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My perpetual collaborator Stephen Ramsey has been researching Assange for our book The Year It All Fell Down and sent me this piece from The Guardian, Tuesday, February 8, 2011, which notes text-messages that seem to prove the two Swedish women he is supposed to have assaulted were lying in their teeth and motivated by jealous revenge.

Here is the article and its headline, unedited.

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Assange’s accusers sent texts discussing revenge, court hears.

Bjarn Hurtig, the WikiLeaks founder’s lawyer in Sweden, says the women’s messages contradict their claims.

Julian Assange’s Swedish lawyer was shown scores of text messages sent by the two women who accuse him of rape and sexual assault, in which they speak of “revenge” and extracting money from him, an extradition hearing was told.

Bjarn Hurtig, who represents the WikiLeaks founder in Sweden, told Belmarsh magistrates court that he had been shown “about 100″ messages sent between the women and their friends while supervised by a Swedish police officer, but had not been permitted to make notes or share the contents with his client.

“I consider this to be contrary to the rules of a fair trial,” he said. A number of the messages “go against what the claimants have said”, he told the court.

Sweden is seeking the WikiLeaks founder’s extradition in relation to allegations of rape, sexual assault and sexual molestation. He denies the accusations.

One message referred to one of the women being “half asleep” while having sex with Assange, Hurtig said, as opposed to fully asleep. “That to my mind is the same as saying ‘half awake’.” One of the women alleges that Assange had sex with her while she was sleeping.

But the lawyer admitted that Swedish prosecutors had tried to interview his client before he left the country, contradicting earlier claims by Assange’s legal team and his own witness statement.

Hurtig told the extradition hearing that he had been wrong to assert that the prosecutor Marianne Ny had made no active attempt to interview Assange between her appointment to the case, on 1 September last year, and 27 September, when Assange left the country with her permission.

Under cross-examination by Clare Montgomery QC for the Swedish government, Hurtig admitted the prosecutor’s office had contacted him on 22 September requesting an interview. Montgomery asked him to take out his mobile and read two text messages received on that date. One, in Swedish, he translated as: “Hello, is it clear if it’s going to be good to have interrogation on Tuesday, 1700h?”

Hurtig said he could not recall calling Assange after receiving the request, but was sure he would have done. “You should bear in mind that it was very difficult to get hold of him during this time,” he said.

The omission was “embarrassing and shouldn’t have happened”, he said. “It’s true that that gave an impression that was to Julian’s advantage.”

But he insisted it was accidental: “I am myself a member of the Swedish bar association and it’s important that what I say is right. It’s also important for Julian that my statement is reliable and correct.”

The hearing did not conclude in the allotted two days and will resume on Friday. Judge Howard Riddle is not expected to deliver his judgment immediately.

He agreed to amend Assange’s bail conditions until Friday, lifting the requirement that he attend a police station near his rural bail address each afternoon.

Earlier, the court heard from a retired prosecutor who said the conduct of the prosecutor had been “quite peculiar” in not seeking to interview Assange earlier. Sven-Erik Alhem said he would also have tried to have Assange interviewed in the UK before seeking his extradition. He added, however, that if he were Assange “I would have gone to Sweden immediately to give my version of events.”

Outside court, Assange tried to put the spotlight on the Swedish prosecutor: “She has refused to come to these hearings. Our witnesses were brought from Sweden, my lawyer was brought from Sweden and expensively cross-examined.

“Where is the equality in this case? There is not an equality. Rather, we see an unlimited budget of Sweden and the UK being spent on this matter and my rather limited budget being spent in response.”

His lawyer, Mark Stephens, said: “We have seen Hamlet without the princess. We have seen a prosecutor who has been ready to feed the media with information but has been unprepared to come here and subject herself to the cross-examination she knows she cannot withstand.”

A further article was in The Guardian on Wednesday, February 9.

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Radical feminism: what it is and why we’re afraid of it

Calling the chief prosecutor in the Assange case a ‘malicious radical feminist’ reflects our misunderstanding of feminism

Jonathan Dean

Sweden’s chief prosecutor Marianne Ny has been accused by a retired judge of being a “malicious radical feminist”.

Alongside the obvious questions of freedom of information and criminal justice, the Julian Assange affair has also made visible a multitude of contemporary anxieties concerning sex and gender. This was brought into sharp relief by claims that Assange’s prospects of a fair trial might be compromised by the possibility that Sweden’s chief prosecutor Marianne Ny is a “malicious radical feminist” with a “bias against men”.

But what exactly is radical feminism? If popular attitudes to feminism are anything to go by, it’s clearly something pretty terrifying.

Research suggests that, in the popular imagination, the feminist, and the radical feminist in particular, is seen as full of irrational vitriol towards all men, probably a lesbian and certainly not likely to be found browsing in Claire’s Accessories. As an academic working on issues concerning gender and politics, I’ve had the good fortune of meeting lots of inspiring feminist women and men but despite searching I’ve yet to locate a feminist matching that particular description. Perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough.

A more likely possibility is that the popular insistence that radical feminists and often by implication feminists in general are all man-haters reflects wider misunderstandings about the history of feminism and its impact on contemporary gender relations.

So what is radical feminism? Historically, radical feminism was a specific strand of the feminist movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late 1960s. Distinctive to this strand was its emphasis on the role of male violence against women in the creation and maintenance of gender inequality (as argued by the likes of Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon). And while a minority of radical feminists, most infamously Valerie Solanas, were hostile to men, radical feminism was much more instrumental in generating widespread support for campaigns around issues such as rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment.

However, in Britain at least, radical feminism has never been particularly dominant, partly because in the eyes of many socialist and postcolonial feminists it has been insufficiently attentive to the intersections between gender inequality and other categories, such as race and class.

So Rod Liddle’s peddling of the tiresome rightwing idea that radical feminism has destroyed the family, along with Dominic Raab’s assault on “feminist bigotry” and the Vatican’s efforts to address “distortions” caused by radical feminism, rest on at least two implausible assumptions.

First, they reduce feminism to a horrifying caricature that never really existed and second, they make the frankly bizarre suggestion that radical feminism is the dominant ideology of our times. It would seem that not only do these radical feminists commit the outrage of not wearing makeup, but they use the time this frees up to consolidate their world domination.

Or an alternative explanation might be that these are the paranoid anxieties of fearful anti-feminists.

Their fear is not totally misplaced, for radical feminism has undoubtedly had some success. Fortunately for Dominic Raab, world domination is not one of them. Three decades ago, the notion that rape and domestic violence are pressing political issues rather than trivialities, or that men should play an active role in childcare, would have been seen by many as radical and dangerous.

Today, thanks to the influence of the insights of diverse strands of feminism (including, but not limited to, radical feminism), these ideas have seeped into the mainstream. Despite this, genuine gender equality can seem distant, but many groups and individuals continue to push in the right direction.

Although the rights and wrongs of the Assange affair are at this stage far from clear, whenever accusations of “man-hating feminism” enter into a debate, our suspicions should be immediately aroused.

For more often than not, the temptation to close down debate by tossing around accusations of man-hating radical feminism is caused not by a fear of debate, but by the deeper fear that feminism might actually have something important to say.

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Thursday, March 10, 2011

Julian Assange police investigator a friend of sex assault accuser.

Officer and Miss A met through political party and corresponded over internet months before WikiLeaks chief was accused

The police investigator who first interviewed two Swedish women about allegations of rape and sexual assault against Julian Assange is a friend and political associate of one of the women, a Swedish newspaper has claimed.

The female officer became friends with the woman referred to in court as Miss A through Sweden’s Social Democratic party, in which both are involved, according to Expressen. The pair corresponded on the internet 16 months before the allegations were made against Assange.

Miss A commented on a Facebook update on the police officer’s page as recently as 10 February, the paper said, and Miss A links to the officer’s private blog from her personal page.

The paper said the officer had made anti-Assange comments on the internet.

The WikiLeaks founder is appealing against a British magistrate’s decision last month to extradite him to Sweden to answer the accusations, which include an allegation of rape against another woman, Miss B. Miss A alleges Assange had sex with her without a condom, against her wishes. He has not been charged with any offence.

His legal team has argued that the Swedish judicial process is unfair and a number of those involved in the prosecution are politically motivated.

According to Expressen, Miss A and the police interrogator had internet contact in April 2009, when Miss A wrote a blog about white men “who take the right to decide what is not abusive”.

The officer commented that the author “puts her finger on the bottom line and speaks out”, to which Miss A replied: “Hello! Thanks for the compliment. And like you say, white men must always defend the right to use abusive words. Then they of course deny that these very words are part of a system that keeps their group at the top of the social ladder.”

The paper said that when another newspaper, Aftonbladet, hosted a recent webchat with Assange, the officer commented “What the heck is this! Judgment zero!”

The previous day she had commented on the same page: “Way to go, Claes Borgstrom!” Borgstrom is the lawyer representing the women and a former SDP politician, who Assange’s team has argued is acting from political motives.

The paper says the officer had just started her shift at Klara police station in Stockholm on 20 August when Miss A and Miss B arrived to make a complaint against Assange. It says she did not declare a conflict of interest. The police say that the officer in question did not interview Miss A and she played no further part in the investigation.

On the basis of the interrogations, duty prosecutor Maria Haljebo Kjellstrand ordered Assange’s arrest, a decision overturned by a more senior prosecutor. Borgstrom appealed against that decision and the case was reinstated by prosecutor Marianne Ny. Mark Stephens, Assange’s lawyer, said they had been aware of the relationship, which had informed their arguments in court last month that the Swedish judicial process had been improper.

“There are a whole raft of issues like this which should cause reasonable people a bit of concern,” he said.

“I’m delighted that the Swedes, who objected so strongly to our criticisms of the case, have started to acknowledge that there are systemic problems in their judicial process which allow this sort of thing to happen.”

Police superintendent Ulf Garanzon told Expressen he was not aware of any relationship between the two women, and would not comment on rumours.

The Swedish prosecutor’s office also declined to comment, citing the ongoing extradition process in the UK.
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It is worth noting, Ramsey says, that the Social Democrat Party of Sweden, despite its name, is famously right-wing.