Defending Assange against sexual assault allegations

[Jim Lane]

358. More responses

Your comments fall into two categories: your continued assumption of the omnipotence of official malefactors, and your arguments concerning points about which you feel deeply but about which I didn’t comment at all, and which are irrelevant to the subject that I’m addressing.

You begin by skipping over my first two points, as to why an operation against Assange might be done more readily in Sweden than elsewhere. As to my third point, you answer that, if it’s a set-up, the facts are irrelevant. Your all-powerful officials could just find a lying “victim” (who never actually had sex with Assange) and find a lying scientist to falsify DNA test results and find the additional lying witnesses who’d be needed to establish the chain of custody of the sample. My view remains that people out to get Assange might be unable to pull off all that but might be able to exploit an opportunity that arose that required much less manipulation. They could find a woman who had consensual sex and get her to say it was nonconsensual; alternatively, if there’s a woman who had a legitimate case under Swedish law but had decided not to pursue it, they could induce her to change her mind and press charges. (Note that in the latter instance it would be true both that Assange was guilty (because a victim’s motivation for coming forward isn’t normally relevant to guilt or innocence) and that there was undisclosed official involvement in causing the case to be brought.)

Your next two arguments are that, from the point of view of maintaining the effectiveness of Wikileaks, Assange has acted imprudently. The point of my post was not to defend every decision Assange has made; it was instead to say that we should not rule out the possibility of an official plot to impair his work.

Next you ask, “So if these powerful people set up Assange, why aren't they setting up Greenwald?” It’s quite possible that they found a target of opportunity concerning Assange but that nothing similar has surfaced to let them get Greenwald.

In attacking my hypothesis about people who are powerful but not omnipotent, you write:

So they are powerful enough to set up Assange in Sweden as part of a very large and complex international conspiracy in order to charge Assange in the US. But they aren't powerful enough to skip that "large and complex international conspiracy" part and just arrest Greenwald while he's in the US?

Although their ideal outcome might be to get Assange to the U.S., they would also do quite well (from their point of view) by either sticking him in a Swedish prison or panicking him into effectively placing himself under house arrest in an embassy. In any of those three situations, he’s less able to continue publishing revelations that discomfit powerful officials. Mission accomplished, if I may borrow a phrase. And, right, they can’t “just arrest Greenwald while he’s in the US.” Our courts do sometimes protect the rights of the accused, even those who are deemed enemies of the state. See, to take the first example that pops into my head, the Supreme Court decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, holding that the Bush administration acted illegally in capturing and imprisoning an alleged enemy combatant without giving him “a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker.” As a result, Hamdi was released and deported.

If you think my scenario makes no sense, you must believe that Hamdi is still at Gitmo. The rest of the world believes that he went back to Saudi Arabia.