It doesn’t matter if the Swedes are planning to send Assange to America or not.
What matters is whether they will do so if they are asked to.
And of course they will.
So Assange is rightly afraid of them, and rightly trying to avoid their handcuffs and cells and months of waiting, trial by media and public pillorying. Obama may not ask for him but Romney, if President, will. The Tea Party will demand it.
How then is Assange to avoid a slow execution like Bradley Manning’s?
Well, we have to save him.
Let us ask one question of the Swedes. It is this. And it is the bottom line.
‘Did the women have consensual sex with Assange after the alleged offense, the alleged rape they suffered at his hands?
‘Did they really do that?’
‘Why did they do that?
‘How can they say he raped them, if, after being raped, they continued to deal cordially with him in bed for days after, when they could have reported him to the police?’
I don’t know what the answer to this question is, but it’s the only one worth asking.
If the answer is yes, we bring him home.
Name:
How? That’s the question.
And fair enough to say we’re almost not even asking it.
But perhaps it occurs that Manning has an Ellsberg like defence for his actions. Then what? Because if he walks then I image that they don’t have the shadow of a case against Assange.
Manning let out too much, too indiscriminately.
Post 9/11, during two ongoing wars, it would be hard not to say he was some sort of traitor.
Assange, the non-US citizen, is better placed.
But he too undermined the Prime Minister of the day in time of war.
But so did the newsmen who reported Patton slapping the soldier in time of war…
Hard to say.
Manning will not walk.
He will not be allowed to walk.
If the women who filed the rape charges consorted “cordially” with Assange after the alleged event then, by the very definition of the term conspiracy, the case against him is flawed.