Tag: assange

Swedish prosecutors want a word with Assange

Posted on March 13, 2015 by - News

chiefIt seems that Swedish prosecutors want to talk to Julian Assange who is still holed up in an Ecuadorian embassy.

The Wikileaks founder Assange skipped bail so that he did not have to be extradited to Sweden to face police questioning on sex charges.

Assange insisted that the whole case against him had been fabricated because the US government was desperate to extradite him to the US to face spying charges.

Assange denies all the sexual assault allegations against him. He has previously called on Swedish prosecutors to question him in London, either in person or via videolink. The Foreign Office said it would welcome this possibly, but prosecutors in Stockholm have argued against it as it is not normal practice.

Now it seems that Sweden has changed its mind and are asking to question Assange in London on allegations of sexual misconduct.

The prosecutor on the case, Marianne Ny, also said she wants to take a DNA sample from Assange.

We don’t think it is likely that Assange will agree to that. He is likely to come up with some excuse that if the Swedes have his DNA the US spooks could plant it in various crime scenes to force him to come to the US.

However one of Assange’s lawyers, Per Samuelson, has welcomed the offer. “This is something we’ve demanded for over four years,” he said.

“Julian Assange wants to be interviewed so he can be exonerated.”

Last year, a Swedish court rejected an appeal by Assange to have his arrest warrant over sexual assault allegations revoked.

The British government says it has spent $10 million policing the embassy to ensure Assange does not flee the country.

Assange lobbies for a giant statue of himself

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

Julian AssangeNo-one can say that being locked up in the Ecuadorean embassy on the run from sex charges has damaged Julian Assange’s ego much.

The founder of Wikileaks wants people to invest their hard-earned dollars into the creation of a life-size bronze public artwork featuring himself, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

“A monument to courage” is a proposed statue by Italian sculptor Davide Dormino, entitled Anything to Say?, will depict the trio standing on chairs, with another empty seat beside them onto which members of the public will be encouraged to climb – allowing them to stand shoulder to shoulder with the whistleblowers.

We would have thought “oh for goodness sake” would have been a better title. Putting Assange in the same league as Manning and Snowden who actually paid the price for actually leaking documents is a bit unfair.  They are either in jail or in exile, for leaking documents. He is banged up in the embassy because he does not want to face questions about two women who laid complaints about sexual assault about  him.  He denies the charges but refuses to go court to face his accusers.

Organisers need £100,000 to complete the project, a sum they hope to raise by 1 January through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. With just 21 days to go, only £19,360 has been pledged – perhaps explaining why Assange chose to alert WikiLeaks’ 2.4 million Twitter followers to the campaign.

According to the Kickstarter page, the statue “is not a simple homage to individuals, but to courage and to the importance of freedom of speech and information”. The reason for the empty chair is that each of us can climb onto it to change our point of view.

“The work of art will travel from country to country and offer the opportunity for us to hear each other out and think.”

The idea for the statue came from Dormino and Charles Glass, an American author, journalist and broadcaster. British journalist Vaughan Smith, with whom Assange stayed while he was on bail in 2010, is organising the Kickstarter campaign. This is surprisingly forgiving of Smith, because when Assange skipped bail he left those who posted bail for him in the embarrassing position where they had to pay up.

“I got excited by it because I thought it was some art that suggested, rather appropriately, that these whistleblowers were our true friends rather than the politicians who pretend to be,” Smith told The Independent.

He added that most of the £100,000 for the project would go towards transporting the artwork around the world and that nobody was being paid for taking part. The rest of the money will go towards the statue’s creation at a foundry in Pietrasanta, Tuscany.

Oddly,Wikileaks will not get any cash out of the project and the sculpture has not worked out a way of getting a good image of Chelsea Manning, whose appearance has changed and there are not enough pictures of her.  There are shedloads of snaps of Assange.

Assange claims great escape

Posted on August 18, 2014 by - News

GreatEscape1WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he will “soon” get out of Ecuador’s embassy in London, although he is keeping the information how a secret, even after calling a press conference to discuss it.

Assange, who clearly does not understand the meaning of open disclosure, has been locked up in the embassy for more than two years to avoid extradition to Sweden on a sex case because he believes he is important enough for the US to bother trying to extradite him.

The US did not bother trying to extradite him when he was in the UK, which was far more likely than Sweden to hand him over.

The 43 year old, who is apparently sick with heart and lung problems, gave a press conference amid speculation in the tabloids that he was set to hand himself over.

Assange confirmed he is leaving the embassy soon, but not for the reasons that “the Murdoch press and Sky News are saying at the moment”.

Assange, was not going to tell anyone how he was getting out the embassy which made the entire press conference a waste of time. Instead the conference was yet another opportunity for the media hungry Assange to restate the same dull excuses for why he is the only person who should not face a court case when two people make a complaint about him

Police have been stationed at the compound since Assange requested political asylum from Ecuador in June 2012, ready to arrest him if he sets foot outside. He has cost the UK taxpaper a bomb and ironically that has meant that he has been effectively under house arrest.