Thursday, February 2, 2012

Swedish prosecutor lies to obtain Assange extradition

The lawyer for the Swedish public prosecutor argued in a London court that the UK should hand over Julian Assange so he can be questioned over allegations of improper or negligent use of a condom during consentual sexual relations:
Swedish prosecutor demands Assange extradition - CBS News: "(AP) LONDON - Sweden's public prosecutor was right to demand the return of Julian Assange, a lawyer told Britain's Supreme Court Thursday, saying that failing to hand over the WikiLeaks chief would break with precedent and wreck European extradition rules.
Clare Montgomery, the lawyer for Sweden's prosecution service, struck back at Assange's legal team's argument that only impartial authorities such as a judge can properly issue European arrest warrants.

"The English notion of an arrest warrant issued by a court is very much an exception," she said, warning later that if the U.K. Supreme Court insisted only honoring judge-issued warrants "it would make it impossible for possibly eight, possibly more European partners" to extradite suspected criminals."
What she doesn't say is what is at issue here: Sweden's government is trying to get its hands on Assange so he can be handed over to the US for prosecution for the actions of Wikileaks.

Assange was responsible for making public a treasure-trove of embarrassing state and defense department documents, which implicated the US of various unsavory activities worldwide. The revelations, after much fanfare, were admitted to be less damaging to national security or US collaborators than alleged by government lackeys and corporate media sluts, but the Obama administration is peerless in its prosecution of whistleblowers -- and so it is with Assange.

The US government's activities would be no less reprehensible if it was honest about its doings and its intentions towards Assange, but at least it could do us all the favor of abandoning the pretense of liberty and justice for all, and all the other uniquely "American" virtues we are constantly bombarded with in the media.

Assange's sexual practices may not be admirable, but his courage in taking on the world's most corrupt and malevolent regime certainly is. The Swedish prosecutor's willingness to sacrifice principle for the sake of currying favor with Washington, on the other hand, will be to its everlasting shame, but in the here and now, it's money that does the talking -- and governments captured by the oligarchy are more than willing to oblige the malefactors and do their dirty work.

So Assange will go down, in order to be made a spectacle of, and object lesson in the consequences of speaking truth to power. He will be condemned even before being brought to trial, and shunted away to some hell-hole to be tortured and barbarized by the world's most civilized criminal syndicate.

With no defenders in the halls of power, his fate is assured.

And so is ours, unless we make Julian Assange the object lesson to the oligarchs about our rejection of their usurpations and gradual but determined destruction of representative government through an informed citizenry. In short, many of us are required to take a stand to break this infernal machine that's grinding humanity into the dust.

The stakes are immense, even if the system seems to only be obsessed with two men at present. Those two might as well be 100 million, for as they fare, so do we all.

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