Listen: Chris Hedges Interviews Julian Assange [View all]

[struggle4progress]

Posted on May 5, 2013
... audio excerpts from their extended conversation in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London ...
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/listen_chris_hedges_interviews_julian_assange_20130505/

Assange, here, as we should expect by now, rather carelessly misrepresents a number of matters:

... JA: Politically, it’s—the head of the Swedish Supreme Court came out and said that the case is a mess ...

Lindskog's 3 April 2013 talk at the University of Adelaide actually ranged over various legal issues surrounding Assange and Sweden, including the problems Swedish transparency law creates with respect to keeping current police investigation documents out of the newspapers and the issue of Assange's possible extradition to the US from Sweden, which Lindskog regards as more or less impossible. Lindskog's comment "It's a mess" occurs a bit after the 0:46 mark in the video, and when he makes it, he has been talking extradition, not about the Swedish criminal case. (If you decide to follow the link to the videotape, you'll want to skip the first 14 minutes which mostly show audience wandering into the auditorium)

Assange -- who (of course) had earlier condemned Lindskog's talk as “absolutely outrageous” (see http://www.news.com.au/national-news/julian-assange-safe-from-extradition-to-us-says-justice-stefan-lindskog/story-fncynjr2-1226612062993) -- has by now had ample time to learn what Lindskog actually said, if he were interested in what Lindskog actually said

...Assange’s assistant: So the U.S. ambassador to the U.K. said .... early 2011 that the U.S. was waiting to see what happened with the Swedish case ...
JA: If not, there’d be one in the queue, and then the other one would come in, and then it would be the plight of the home secretary to make a decision, a reviewable court decision, a politically reviewable decision, to swap the precedent for these ...

US ambassador to the UK Louis Susman was on the 20 February 2011 Andrew Marr Show, and he said no such thing. Watch it yourself: the clip is only a bit over one minute