Sunday, December 12, 2010
Allegations Against WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange is Weak and Difficult to Prove.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was accused by two women--Anna Ardin (left) and Sofia Wilen--of failing to use a condom during consensual sex. With Sweden's unusual laws, this translates into the crime of rape.
Julian Assange meet Anna Ardin, who worked as an official with Sweden's Social Democratic Party The two met first on August 14th.According to her testimony, which was leaked to the Swedish media, the pair went out for dinner and returned to the flat, where they had sex. At some point a condom broke, a fact that neither side denies. Ardin alleges that it was broken deliberately by Mr Assange.
Ardin is regarded as leftist as well as feminist. She had been actively involved in helping out Assange on his tour. Some have suggested she may be working with the CIA and some claim that this makes Ardin the perfect choice to lay a sex trap. Is there any evidence that she might be involved with U.S. intelligence. There is some but it is hardly conclusive.
"...The evidence against Assange... would look even less credible in the face of tweets by Anna Ardin and SMS texts by Sofia WilĂ©n boasting of their respective conquests after the “crimes”.
In another senario, US may pass new law to prosecute Assange. That Washington would like to take legal action against him and as quickly as possible can hardly be in doubt. But building a case solid enough to allow Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, to seek Assange's extradition from Britain, if that is where he still is at the time, or – possibly more problematically – from Sweden, may not be easy. The most obvious first stop might be the 1917 Espionage Act. But when the US government tried to use it to punish The New York Times for publishing the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, it failed.
It is for that reason that some US politicians are introducing draft legislation to expand existing US laws to make it easier for Mr Holder to do his job. The so-called Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination (Shield) Bill was thus introduced by Congressman Peter King, a Republican from New York who will become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when the new House of Representatives with a Republican majority convenes in January. The Bill would make it illegal to publish the names of military or intelligence community informants.
Even as some government officials contend that the release of thousands of classified documents by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange jeopardizes U.S. national security, legal experts, Pentagon officials and Justice Department lawyers concede any effort to prosecute him faces numerous hurdles.
Prosecutors apparently have had difficulty finding evidence that Assange ever communicated directly with Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, 23, an intelligence specialist who’s widely thought to be the source of the documents, but is charged only with misusing and illegally downloading them.
In addition, any potential Assange prosecution on charges that he intentionally threatened U.S. national security would be complicated because top national security leaders disagree about how damaging the leaks have been. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the release could put lives in danger, but Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called the reaction “overwrought” in a briefing with reporters.
The Guardian commentator posting on the News blog at 11:30 on December, 8 said that he could not find any evidence “either that the US are orchestrating this, or that the Swedes are doing anything other than trying to investigate serious allegations.” However, many have talked or hinted at a conspiracy against WikiLeaks. The Daily Mail’s Richard Pendlebury says there are “several puzzling flaws in the prosecution's case.” Feminist lawyer, Lindsay Beyerstein, thinks it is curious that “charges against Assange were brought, dropped almost immediately and later reinstated.”
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