@ Time To Turn
Of all the places to reproduce a paranoid conspiracy theory like that below the line, one would have thought FSTDT is one of the least likely. Assange was perfectly happy to travel between Sweden, the UK, Australia and other countries, from many of which the US could have requested extradition. When one of his main sources, Chelsea Manning, was arrested, you might think that Assange would have traveled somewhere the US couldn't get at him. No, he didn't; he carried on just as before. You'd think he might have been very afraid when the press across the world when the papers were printing stuff from WikiLeaks. But he kept right on traveling to Sweden. Only when the Swedish prosecutor decided to take up the case again did he decide to flee to the UK where, paradoxically, it is much easier to extradite to the US than from the country where he was wanted.
We are told that of course Assange would be 'disappeared'; dictatorships do it all the time. It is hard to tell what to think about the attempt by Assange's supporters to paint Sweden - a neutral country with one of the best human rights records in the world - as a banana republic, cowering before the US; is it offensive, or just laughable? It would be hard to imagine a worse country for the US to try something like that. And how is one of the most public fugitives in the world going to be 'disappeared'?
The facts are that the Swedes have enough evidence to pursue their investigations, that the British Supreme and High Courts threw out every single argument Assange's lawyers put up for not extraditing him and, despite his extensive knowledge of American secret documents, that he has failed to produce a single US administration document showing the Americans want to extradite him.
Don't try to second guess my idea of covert US actions; despite what the rhetoric you read tells you, a liberal centrist is not the same as a fascist. Do I have an agenda? I'll tell you what my 'agenda' is: I don't care what Assange's politics are (given the WikiLeaks Political Party, right-wing libertarian is probably nearest the mark), but I do care that he's an alleged rapist and a bail jumper and I believe in due process of law. It behooves you very little to talk about "how these are the same people who believe that rape never happens because it's always a false accusation by the woman," when you are accusing women, on the basis of nothing more than your admiration for Assange, of being politically motivated in making a false accusation of an alleged crime. But, there again, the far left doesn't usually worry about things such as due process, or its own hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy.
