Re: [Marxism] Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The presumption of innocence seems a reasonable starting point for any accuserd person, though rape is a singular crime in terms of the ability of the accused to hide behind that presumption when the authorities permit it. I don't know Assange or anybody else I've only seen on TV...and I've not been following him personally or his case all that closely. I do know that people don't become transformed in an instantaneous bolt from the blue...in a Saul-like conversion to being a serial rapist. It's not as though Assange hasn't been under someone's microscope for some time...and a particularly high resolution one at that.. The timing of the charges make their motivation fairly transparent. The journalistic personalities that constitute that community in the US are going to go after this sort of thing like red meat not particularly because of the government's encouragement of it, but because Assange has been doing precisely what they don't do.. Then, too, those TV personalities who see treating women this way as a matter of entitlement would be particularly resentful of tthe idea that a rival would do wo without going the TV and corporate route It all just stinks. And that's all we actually know or can know about it at this point... ML Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The timing of the charges make their motivation fairly transparent. Exactly. How many times do we have to see this done? Does the former Marine Scott Ritter really like young women with taught bottoms -- even if they might be under the legal age? I would guess so. Was Elliot Spitzer really using hookers? Yup, it seems so. But one would be a fool to think that Ritter's arrest right at the critical time before the Iraq war when he was being routinely seen on the mainstream corporate mass media espousing questioning or anti-invasion views as an unimpeachable expert was merely coincidental. Similarly, do we really think Spitzer's arrest at the beginning of the financial crisis and the fact that his record on financial issues and views likely would've boosted his political power also a coincidence? These are simply political hits; takedowns using the law to do the timely elimination of political opponents. -- At all times throughout history, the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology. -- Karl Marx Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I agree with Johansen 1000%. Assange is a hero, likely a martyr, thanks to the left as well as mainstream media failure to rally, really rally, to protect him. Nothing probably reveals the nadir of the liberal capitalist epoch so much as what the presumed opponents of censorship have let happen to Assange Peggy Powell Dobbins Sociology as an Art Form www.peggydobbins.net On Nov 19, 2010, at 11:58 PM, Ralph Johansen Here's a guy who has worked incessantly and against all odds to bring up these materials which outdo anything anyone has done since another very courageous person, Dan Ellsberg, brought us the Pentagon Papers. Assange has done this at serious risk of assassination, being chased all over the globe, eluding the many agents capable of doing him in, fearing for his life, also risking almost certain destruction of his credibility and reputation, which is now taking place in spades, while American journalists largely ignore what he has done and minimize its import, while like NYT's John Burns playing up the smear. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I don't know what power the left has to protect Assange in this country. Where's the European movement on this? ML Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Both of Assange's accusers allegedly have similar accounts. They are said to report that what began as consensual sexual encounters became non-consensual, and therefore sexual assault (rape) when the condom broke (in one case) and when the Wikileaks founder stopped using a condom (in the other). I don't particularly LIKE Assange. He seems like a smarmy, self-satisfied, quite comfortable in his privileges gavacho. But I'd like to see a list (a very long list, I hope) of similar condom cases of regular non-prominent people that these same Swedish prosecutors have pursued in the past few years before feeling comfortable crediting this accusation. And while we're speaking of the prosecutors, in addition to the list of similar cases but not involving prominent people in the CIA's cross- hairs, I'd like to examine the prosecutor's bank accounts, retirement funds, etc., before saying it is Assange's private sexual conduct and not the wikileaks web site that he is really being prosecuted for. And, oh yeah, I'd like to see the bank account and so on of the women. Sorry. But this stinks more than the 300 plus aborted fetuses they found in a Thai Buddhist temple this week. I'd also need a minute-by-minute, blow by blow account of what the military attaches, CIA station chiefs, FBI representatives, Interpol agents, copyright extortionists (RIAA/MPAA) and other Yankee representatives have been up to in Sweden or in relation to Sweden in the last few months. Barring that, I'll say that I have close to zero doubt that the charges against Assange could very well be true. But I have less than zero doubt that this is a politically motivated frame-up. Still, I don't want to turn my back on the women. I was once in a situation where a woman changed her mind or got cold feet or however one might express it once we were in bed. Somehow she got me to stop. I can't say that I'm proud of that night, but in the end, she did get me to act with minimum decency. So I do not at all discount what the prosecution claims was the account of Assange's partners. Intimacy necessarily implies making oneself vulnerable to one's partner, and given social, biological and physical factors, the woman who decides to stop despite an insistent partner is in a tremendously weaker position than a man who makes a similar decision would be. (Obviously, I'm thinking here of heterosexual relationships as they were in the last third or fourth of the 20th Century.) Nor do I discount the legitimacy of a complaint that what one person thought would be a desirable partner suddenly became UNdesirable, for whatever reason, nor the legitimacy or seriousness of an accusation that this other partner refused to stop and forced himself on the unwilling person. I've been close enough to being that unwilling to stop partner, that rapist, to know that the accounts the Swedish prosecutors have put out are completely credible, and this type of charges is entirely legitimate. But at least from the bare-bones sketch of the complaints one sees in the press, this seems to be a case of she-said, he-said that would fall way short of a beyond a reasonable doubt or even a preponderance of the evidence standard. But if that is so --and assuming the account of the two women is completely truthful-- then the question arises, why are the Swedish prosecutors pursuing this case? It seems inherently unwinnable, if there is no corroborating evidence (for example, the women having been treated for having been assaulted within a day or two of the encounter, with bruises and so on) and if there were such evidence, I think we would have heard by now. So, ASSUMING the charges are true, they're almost certainly unprovable because they lack corroboration. Now, if the Swedish prosecutors have a record of bringing similar charges, despite being unwinnable, I'd be willing to suspend disbelief and suppose that the charges against Assange are NOT politically motivated. But absent that, I have to assume Swedish prosecutors, like those everywhere else, aren't into losing cases and therefore also not into presenting judicially unprovable charges, especially NOT in a case likely to garner public notice. For that reason, if they nevertheless DO bring such charges, one has to suspect an ulterior motive having nothing to do with Assange's bedroom manners. And in Assange's case, there just does happen to be such an ulterior motive, one so strong that Pentagon and Administration flacks regularly libel him as being a terrorist, or at least an accomplice, and at any rate a baby killer who eats them for breakfast. Joaquín Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu
Re: [Marxism] Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Joaquín Bustelo wrote I don't particularly LIKE Assange. He seems like a smarmy, self-satisfied, quite comfortable in his privileges gavacho...I'll say that I have close to zero doubt that the charges against Assange could very well be true. _ What arrant, thoughtless bilge. Here's a guy who has worked incessantly and against all odds to bring up these materials which outdo anything anyone has done since another very courageous person, Dan Ellsberg, brought us the Pentagon Papers. Assange has done this at serious risk of assassination, being chased all over the globe, eluding the many agents capable of doing him in, fearing for his life, also risking almost certain destruction of his credibility and reputation, which is now taking place in spades, while American journalists largely ignore what he has done and minimize its import, while like NYT's John Burns playing up the smear. What company you keep. Have you heard him speak as to his motivation and his mission? Did you listen to the London press conference in which he and Ellsberg participated? Where in those words do you detect smarm and privilege? Where in your arrogant, thoughtless ramblings is the fading presumption of innocence, which I would expect would be of particular concern to anyone participating in this list, komrade? Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Joaquín Bustelo wrote I don't particularly LIKE Assange. He seems like a smarmy, self-satisfied, quite comfortable in his privileges gavacho...I'll say that I have close to zero doubt that the charges against Assange could very well be true. _ The question is, how do you know that? Granted it's perfectly possible that he is all the things you say he is, but unless you know him personally, you'll notice that those traits you've ascribed to him are exactly the sorts of traits the media ascribes to anyone who chooses to critique the United States from a perspective outside the tightly delimited consensus that reigns in mainstream organisations (this is the second option, of course, and is only deployed if the first option - completely ignoring the critic - is unavailable). So Assange refuses to answers questions about his personal life on CNN or wherever, and this is played as another example of his smug, self-satisfaction, rather than, say, a principled refusal to talk about anything other than the extremely important documents he has released and the work he obviously believes in. As for the rapes, of course it's possible that they are true, but then there's something like this: Increasingly, attention has been focused on the role of Anna Ardin, the more visible of the two complainants. Her apparent mix of establishment cred, together with her varied activist/political career radical feminist, Christian social democrat, ambitious political intern seems to flummox non-Swedish commentators, who don’t understand that that is an establishment career in Sweden. Ardin has not only worked as an intern in the Swedish foreign affairs department, including a tour of DC and Cuba (from which she was allegedly deported), but has also interned on the op-ed page of the Gothenburg afternoon paper GT, part of the Expressen stable, owned by the right-wing Bonnier family (yep, Sweden has right-wingers). It was to the relentlessly anti-left Expressen that the story of the initial charges of rape against Assange were released (a breach of Swedish law), in the small window of time before they were rescinded by a higher prosecutor. Were there accusations of violent rape involved in this case, I’d be a lot more circumspect about reporting some of this, but it seems no one is asserting physical coercion. So here goes: two separate sources from the Swedish left have told me that they regard Ardin as more than a little over-the-top, and subject to some compelling obsessions. Another source said he was pretty sure of the identity of SW, the other complainant, and that some people had held suspicions about her bona fides as a member of the left. So, all to be taken on advisement. But in assessing the possibility that more is going on than lerv gone wrong, one has to bear in mind that Sweden is a conflicted establishment; the Social Democrat party that has run it for decades has actively opposed US foreign policy in Vietnam, Chile and a hundred other places, and stayed out of NATO. But in the Cold War, Sweden ran its own substantial army, and security service with intensive back-channel US-Swedish co-operation and co-ordination. The pro-US forces within the Swedish establishment extend across the right (the Moderate(!) Party) and the right of the Social Democrats, who have far more animus to the assorted Swedish left (especially the libertarian-left) than to their rightward opponents. The involvement of Claes Borgstrom, a Social Democratic party heavy and the party’s current spokesperson on gender equality, is very interesting in that respect, not least because his sister Annette Kullenberg is a leading journalist (and, inevitably, novelist and TV thriller writer), who works for … Expressen. I’m not suggesting anything other than a suffocatingly tight establishment, but it’s a picture in miniature of how Sweden works. So deep breath … if you were to set out to destabilise a Sweden-based global whistleblower organisation, one easy way would be to have someone set off a chain of sexual chaos that gets a high-profile uber-activist and one who’s previously written a guide to sexual revenge spinning like a top, and drawing in Sweden’s expansive sex-crime and harassment laws, marshalling the very scenario that would make it difficult for the left to throw in accusations of obvious manipulation and entrapment. You’d then leak stories of internal dissent to a journalist with US intelligence
Re: [Marxism] Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Would it not make sense for the US to plant female volunteers? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == At this point, it would be the easiest thing in the world for anyone to do that. It can be strung out indefinately with nobody every having to prove anything. ML Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
