Assange's mom says Wikileaks founder suffering

[struggle4progress]

62. It's not my task to decide whether the Swedish investigation would lead to prosecution, or

(if the investigation led to prosecution) whether Assange would win or lose the case

The fact is that the Swedish authorities began proceedings against him and that he fled the country while the authorities were negotiating with his lawyer to schedule an interview

He had come to Sweden, where some of his servers were located, in the hopes of moving there, and had even submitted a residency application

But when his sexual activities resulted in women asking the authorities whether there would be any way to force him to get an AIDS test for nonconsensual (because unprotected) sex, he skipped over to England and initially confessed charmingly to his own sexual chauvinism and complained of Sweden's "revolutionary feminists"

His story changed with time: eventually it became a dark tale of Sweden's medieval dungeons, Sweden's thralldom to American overlords, the likelihood that extradition to Sweden was a mere cover for extradition to the US, and the intent of the CIA to hustle him into Guantanamo for torture or execution

None of these claims comports with the facts, and in fact he argued none of the claims in the UK courts, because he would have been laughed to scorn if he had. The Swedish courts are as well-insulated from political interference as any Western courts, the barriers being built into the Swedish constitution. Groundless prosecution is a crime in Sweden, and the victims of crimes in Sweden have some rights towards the prosecution of their own cases. The European treaties governing successive extraditions would require the UK to sign off on an extradition from Sweden to the US, and Assange in that case would have recourse to courts in both Sweden and the UK appealing it, so that sending Assange to the US from Sweden would be even harder than simply sending him to the US from the UK -- in addition to which we should add, that the UK was much more closely connected to the Bush-era rendition program and "war on terror" than Sweden ever was

By skipping bail and fleeing to the embassy, Assange also distracted attention from the fact that he had failed to file any appeal of the UK court decision with the European court in Strasbourg. Why did he skip that appeal? The natural guess is that he really had nothing to offer there