Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Wikileaks has shattered the Brittle confection of sweet lies and smooth deceptions that the failed leadership of the West hides behind
Not just the West, mind. We're just the most outraged about that.
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I reckon Sweden and Britain will be quite careful with him, and Palin's idiocy aside, the US won't be overly keen to do a drone strike on London or Stockholm.
If it was going to happen, I'd pick a much more prosaic murder style - poison, shooting, car bomb, ice-pick, strangled, etc. Preferably through a well-organized proxy, leaving no fingerprints. But I doubt it will happen - slamming him in prison on a sex charge is a far better outcome. Then he's got something to lose by releasing the keys to the residual data.
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two minor asides:is wikileaks so dependent on assange that it cannot survive his incarceration? is the cult of personality *that* powerful?
I imagine it will survive, although if his incarceration turns out to be both trumped up and politically motivated, it's an extremely intimidatory action to take. On the other hand, it's more grist for the Wikileaks mill, giving them their best martyr.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I know we're past this point, but for reference, they would get busted for simply paying a prostitute for sex. It's not illegal to sell sex, but it is illegal to buy sex in Sweden.
That's almost as stupid as it was here before legalization. Hard to imagine a law more conducive to blackmail.
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Surely it would make more sense for the women to test themselves for STDs? If that's what they're trying to find out, whether they were infected.
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You are aware that neither of these women is a prostitute, yes?
I was not. Now I'm feeling quite foolish. Not even sure where I got that idea.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yes, it all makes sense in context. My point is that foreigners who have any experience with prostitutes anywhere else in the world might be very, very surprised by what they can get busted for in Sweden. The general uncontrolled seediness of the job means that men can have wildly differing expectations. After having shelled out your hundred euros, or whatever he payed, to get done for pushing the prostitutes legs apart without her explicitly saying that's OK, might seem implausible. It probably is actually implausible in most cases too, I'm sure prostitutes aren't considered reliable witnesses and don't bother with more than threats (including their own threats of violence, of course, at the hands of their pimp). That this has landed with Interpol seems very, very strange to me.
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I think it quite likely we'll never have any real certainty about what really happened, that this will be word against word. Exactly what verbal agreements were made about condom usage and middle of the night sexual activity are not likely to be on record.
FWIW, I wonder if Assange fell foul of something some people I know who went to various brothels in Scandinavia mentioned: That they are extremely specific about what it is you are paying for when you purchase sexual services, right down to exact positions, whether you can make eye contact, whether you can say anything to them, etc. This was an unusual experience for the people I'm talking about, who have been to brothels all around the world. Essentially, you're meant to describe, in great detail, exactly what it is you want to do beforehand, and any deviations from the script mean you lose your money and are summarily booted out, and often threatened with the law.
This is, of course, fair enough in any society in which sex is a legal business, although one does have to wonder why it is that deviations from this kind of verbal contract find their way into criminal courts, rather than civil ones. Crimes and police, and particularly Interpol are meant to be about protecting people from major harms, not ensuring they get the sharp end of a financial deal. If the customer became violent, fair enough. We'll see if that's what really happened here. Or, more likely, we will hear two stories and never have any real certainty which one is true.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Sacha,
I'm finding it interesting in all the paper news how few references there are to Assange having handed himself in. Not mentioning this casts quite a different light on his arrest, and the refusal of bail.
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I'm surprised Public Address can get through the wall.
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