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In reply to the discussion: I Have No Words... The Rape Threads Meet The Authoritarian Threads... [View all]struggle4progress
(126,191 posts)Sweden went to court in the UK to ask that Assange be extradited to Sweden so that Sweden could prosecute him for rape. The UK courts determined that Sweden was indeed seeking Assange in order to prosecute him for rape and determined that extradition request was proper
The issue here is not some desire of Swedish authorities to have a little conversation with Assange, whether by video-link or over tea and crumpets. Sweden intends to take Assange into custody in order to proceed with prosecution, and there is accordingly a Swedish arrest warrant, judicially-sanctioned by a proper Swedish court, for that purpose
Under the extradition treaty governing extraditions between the UK and Sweden, Sweden cannot forward extradite Assange to a third country without the consent of the UK, once the UK has extradited him to Sweden: this means that Assange would be able to fight such a forward extradition request in both the Swedish and the UK courts. Moreover, one of Assange's own witnesses in the UK case testified that forward extradition from Sweden to the US in this case would be a practical impossibility. For these and other reasons, extradition to the US directly from the UK would be much easier than extradition from the UK to Sweden followed by forward extradition from Sweden to the US. And, in any case, no charges against Assange have been filed to date in the US
Unlike Manning, Assange is not subject to UCMJ, and were the US to decide to file charges against Assange, those charges could not be the charges filed against Manning. No prisoner has been brought to Guatanamo Bay since the Bush era, and Mr Obama would have closed the facility by now, were it not for Congressional obstruction of his stated intent to do so
The scenarios pushed by Assange and his lawyers are either just cynical bullshizz or evidence of paranoid mental defect