Gerard on Insiders a few minutes ago said that if the Americans had wanted to extradite Assange they could have asked the British for him. It was easier to get him out of Britain, he said, than to get him out of Sweden.
No it wasn’t, Cameron would have lost office over it. His partners in coalition, the Liberal Democrats, are anti-Guantanamo and to a great extent anti-American and they would have forbidden him to do it. And it may in fact have come up in discussions already and they may have told him already that he couldn’t. ‘Assange is a hero to about thirty million British,’ they may have said, ‘and if you deliver him up to torture and life imprisonment the Tories could lose eighty seats and we, the Liberal Democrats, be obliterated.’
Gerard fails to have noticed this. He says Assange is a ‘narcissist’, as if that had anything to do with anything, and has lost all his friends who will now want their money back; want him dead, it seems, and their money back; and Rinehart, moreover, has no plans whatever to interfere in the editorial policy of Fairfax.
He has clearly lost touch with the known world and I ask his new virgin saint Rinehart, whose poetry I have printed and praised here, for his job.
I will do four columns a week like this one for half his wage.
If Rinehart is interested in circulation, and why else would she buy shares in it, she will take up my offer.
Name:
Nonsense. There has been very little public interest in the UK about A’s situation. Check the papers. A proper extradition request from the US would not have caused a stir beyond the Guardian and the New Statesman. The Lib Dems would not give up what power they have for his cause.
It is precisely because they would not give up power that they would order Cameron to save his life.
Nor would Cameron give up power by outraging twenty million British voters by causing Assange’s death.
Your first sentence is a lie. It has been number one, two, or three on BBC World since Assange went to the embassy.
Lie again and I will ban you for life.
Bob, so far as I know, you are the only one suggesting that Assange will be killed. I doubt that there are 20 million in the UK who agree with you. Or would agree if they had ever heard of you.
So I still say your remarks about why the US did not try to extradite him from the Uk are nonsense.
Have you ever been to Sweden? Do you know any Swedes? I know several who are politically on the left but strongly believe that he should return to Sweden. They believe their justice system is being challenged, and they don’t like it.
I can’t see why Sweden can’t go to the UK to interview him but, and if you knew Swedes you would understand, they have away of doing things, they believe that is the correct way and they will not bend.
Swedes sound a lot like Australians; here, too, the so-called left so often are xenophobes at heart.
“Their justice system” should be challenged, same as everyone else’s. And “they” should be the ones doing it, and it clearly needs it, from what I’ve read of this case.
Given the great harm Assange had done to powerful people in the US (in particular and most damaging for him, to the prestige of people like Clinton) any decent justice system would have taken all possible steps consistent with finding the facts to accommodate to his situation.
Assange would clearly have far more and far more influential supporters in the UK than in Sweden, so to say it makes no difference to his danger from the US which country he is in is silly.
Bob Carr, that glowing statesman of deeply etched experience, erudite and sagacious, leader of men, World’s Best Foreign Minister, said pretty much the same thing on Insiders. I’m sure you didn’t fail to notice.
To Reader 2:
How many Americans want Bradley Manning killed? Eighty million? A hundred million? And Assange is his publisher. Two presidential front-runners called for Assange to be ‘extra-legally’ killed, two for his death by lethal injection after a trial.
And you’re saying I’m the only person who ever said he will be. And saying as well, I guess, that the two sex charges in Sweden by two right-wing girls are a mere coincidence, nothing to do with a hundred million Americans who want him killed, and an American Secretary of State who wants him in Guantanamo.
Please say why you think this.
To Spleenblatt:
I did, and will attempt his re-education.
Hmmm, you seem to be suggesting that the U.K. Government can make decisions about extradition – are they not subject to the courts there? And the U.K. supreme court has granted the request from Sweden for extradition. All the U.K. Government has to say is that they are seperate from the court system and then they would not recieve any blame at all. Apart from the usual screaming activists that is – however they don’t decide elections.
I have no idea. Where are those “front runners” now?
Yeah, I think the Swedish case probably has nothing to do with Wikileaks. How do you know the young women are right wing?
The prosecutor is behaving pretty much as I would expect an investigating official to behave under a continental legal system? It’s an inquisitorial system, not an adversarial system like ours. The prosecutors are very independent and often mount a campaign. That was how the Milan magistrates kept after Belusconi for years.
They expect witnesses to come to them when called.
Don’t mind taking five years to find out if they have a case you mean?
When they could find out in a day? By skype? Or flying to London?
The Milan magistrates took longer going after Belusconi.
And the longer it goes on the longer the prosecutors feel important.
There is no extra evidence to be had. It is his word against theirs, and who is paying them.
This can be discovered in a hour.
That hour has been two years delayed.
Why?
Bob, as a gentleman of firmly held views, and as a matter of principal, given the level of criticism directed toward the rising star of the Fairfax share registry through these pages, should Henderson step aside or be removed from his columnist’s position I’d be surprised if you accepted what could be possibly argued as tainted coin.
Isn’t there something slightly skewed in being critical of an individual and then accepting to be employed by them?
Perhaps the saving grace is ‘public company’, irrespective of whoever is holding the majority of shares, but that interpretation still seems a bit at odds with the starting point – you don’t like her, or her behaviour.
I had a column in Fairfax for three years, and it was highly esteemed, read out in parliament, and so on. It was cancelled after the Abbott and Costello case, with regret, by Paul McGeogh whom I respect.
I see no difficulty. They publish Marr, Carlton, Crabb, Sheehan, Henderson, McGeogh and, for a long time, Miranda Devine; a variety.
I don’t mind being in that variety.