Naomi Wolf vs. Jaclyn Friedman
- Feminists Debate Sexual Allegations Against Julian Assange
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Dear Mr. Michael Moore,
I read your open letter to the Swedish Government. I am afraid they will probably not answer. They’re a bit busy at the moment: The aftermath of the financial crisis requires attention. And there’s also the thing with the first suicide bomber in our country, which has caused quite some commotion. But don’t you worry, it is very unlikely that we will use this single act of terror as an excuse to invade a country. Or maybe a very small one, but that it is unlikely.
Anyway, since the Government will not answer your letter I thought maybe I could send you a short note,from the perspective of a Swedish lawyer on how the Swedish legal system works and how it doesn’t work . It seems there is some confusion here, probably as a result of differences between our systems.
1. I am afraid that you sent the letter to wrong place. In Sweden we keep our judicial system separated from the Government. The courts and the prosecutors carry out their work without intervention of the Swedish government. In fact, such intervention is forbidden.
We think this is a good idea, but maybe we should think more outside the box here. It is just that states that allow for the Government to decide if an accused person should be held in custody or not in our country would be considered as dictatorships. Like the Soviet Union.
2: In some countries the Government runs a little judicial system of its own, on the side. I know that some countries even run little torture camps, so to say, outside the borders of the country where it is said that normal rules don’t apply. This way one could escape the tiresome requirements of due process, for instance.
The Swedish state has not taken this route, even if there are several nice islands close that could be used for this purpose. Ösel, for instance. Or Åland. But so far the Swedish government has refrained from trying to cheat its way out of the requirements of the rule of law in such a way.
I am sure this seems very backwards and inefficient to you. Anyway, this all means that the Government has nothing to do with the the processes of the legal system in individual cases.
3.Statistics is a difficult thing. Not all people know how to read statistics. When you quote statistics on the ratio between reported rape and legal proceedings, you seem to be getting it quite wrong, I am afraid. A reported crime is not the same as a crime and it is something completely different from a provable crime.
Many reports of rape has its background in events that have happened behind the closed doors of a home. In these cases it can often be difficult to prove what has happened. And when sufficient evidence cannot be produced we have this peculiar principle in Swedish law called the presumption of innocence. You might have heard of it.
It means that if the prosecutor cannot prove her case the law will consider the accused person as innocent. The downside of this is that possibly guilty men and women will go free. Yes, we would even let ”thousands of Swedish rapists roam free” if needed to uphold a Rechtsstaat.
4. Maybe there’s another difference here. In Sweden, we try not to let statistics influence individual cases of criminal investigations or proceedings. In your letter you quote (misinterpreted) statistics and seem to hold that this has relevance for whether Mr. Assange should be arrested or not. (So far the only question on the table has been whether to arrest Mr. Assange.)
In the view of our archaic legal system it is not considered relevant whether Mr. Assange or someone else involved in the case, or if the allegations as such, fall into any particular statistical category. Each case should be dealt with individually.
5. A little digression into the Swedish language. In Sweden we have a saying that has recently become popular. We talk about ”foliehattar”. A foliehatt is a hat made by tin foil. It is used by people who wants to protect the brain from mind reading and other intrusions, for instance by the Government. I am not sure, but I think that the hat may also be used to block out signals from a transmitter that has been hidden in someone’s teeth.
When a person is called a foliehatt it’s often because she’s a conspiracy theorist. The Assange case is a wet dream for the conspiracy theorist. Some talk about ”dark forces”, others about ”honey traps”, and you pitch in a little story about ”a conservative MP” that supposedly influenced the prosecutors in Sweden to change their position.
People forming these arguments we call foliehattar in Swedish. It is difficult to take such arguments seriously. Some of these arguments may turn out to be, in reality, true or somewhat true. But it seems unlikely. It seems unlikely that an advanced CIA/Mossad/SÄPO trap would use these kinds of accusations. They crimes that Mr. Assange has been accused of are not the kind of activities that would put you in jail for a very long time. It seems unlikely also for a lot of other reasons. Even thewikileaks people in Sweden seem to think so. But what do I know, maybe it’s all part of the plan.
6. Your argument seem to be resting on an idea of fairness different from that of our little system. Here’s a quote. ”But that really wouldn’t be like you would it, to go all the way to another country to pursue a suspect for sexual assault when you can’t even bring yourselves to make it down to the street to your own courthouse to go after the scores of reported rapists in your country.” You seem here to be saying, in a nuanced manner, that since many rapists are allowed to walk free in Sweden, without even being brought to justice, the accusations of Mr. Assange shouldn’t be investigated. I don’t agree with the premise of the argument.
Outside my window right now I see a father with a trolley, a woman holding a bag full of Christmas presents and two people trying wipe snow off their cars. Now, I know you can’t tell just from looking – but I would be quite surprised if all these people turned out to rapists. But let’s assume they are rapists, rapists that are being allowed to push trolleys, buy Christmas presents and drive cars, without the Government even trying to arrest them. Even if it was so, I can’t understand why not another accusation should be sufficiently investigated. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
7. Finally, to clear out some misunderstandings that have flourished in the discussion: Mr. Assange has not been charged with anything by anyone as of yet (and maybe he never will – the investigation is still ongoing); it is not criminal to have sex without a condom in Sweden; it is criminal to have sex without a condom if the person you’re having sex with wants you to use a condom; it can be criminal to have sex with a sleeping person; whether the accused person is a saint, or a horrible person, has no influence on the investigation of a crime; Sweden’s rape law is as far as I understand it not that different from most other Western countries.
Futhermore: Mr. Assange has the right to be presumed innocent, and a right to privacy; the women that has accused Mr. Assange of a crime should be considered as trustworthy as long as no compelling evidence says otherwise, and these women also has a right to privacy. Here I think that we have already seen a problem with the Swedish legal system, namely that it does not protect privacy enough in matters such as these. This holds for both Mr Assange, as well as for the women that made the allegations. We should also talk more about the relationship between the protection of privacy and freedom of speech. But these points have been completely lost in some strange war where people feel they have to take sides in an ongoing investigation regarding something they cannot know anything about. Quite depressing, really. Personally I sympathize strongly with wikileaks and the struggle for transparency. But that is not what the Swedish legal system is occupied with at the moment.
Allright, that was just some thoughts from Stockholm. I am sorry for mistreating the English language like this. I have been trying to make knäck at the same time as I wrote this. Have you tried it? I think you’d like it. Knäck is normally very tasty. This batch turned out a bit burned, though. Those damned dark forces.
With best regards from a snowy Stockholm
Mårten
[Update: A preliminary draft of this post was published for a short while here. A hacker attack, I'm sure.]
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John Pilger: Swedes are smearing him and encouraging the US
Sunday, 19 December 2010
I don't regard the Guardian article as revelatory but as more of what we know, plus scuttlebut. There are serious omissions. The impression is given that Julian Assange refused to attend a meeting with the Swedish director of prosecutions on 14 October. This is false. Assange offered to attend on the 15th and 16th. When these days weren't suitable, he offered a complete week instead.
What happened in Sweden was a public smear, and trial by Swedish tabloid media. The chief prosecutor, Eva Fine, understood this. After making her own inquiries, she cancelled the arrest warrant. "Julian Assange is not suspected of rape," she said. It was only the intervention of a leading political figure, Claes Borgstrom, that reactivated the case.
After the "crime", one of the women wrote on Twitter that she was with "the world's coolest smartest people". And when asked whether Assange should leave her flat, she replied, "No, it's not a problem. He's very welcome to stay here." Referring to their night together, she said that she "felt dumped" when he left her bed to work on his computer.
This may help to explain why Assange is not charged with any crime, and why the director of prosecutions has appeared so reluctant to provide the defence with documents. The first official document arrived on 18 November, three months after the alleged offences.
Whether or not the smear is a "CIA conspiracy", it is clear that Assange's name has been blackened. Also, the women's details have been hauled across the internet. And his very serious enemies in Washington have been hugely encouraged to pursue their vicious campaign against him. Meanwhile, we have the spectacle of the US Attorney General trying to concoct a specious law to prosecute Assange for revealing the lies and obsessions of rapacious great power, which, under the First Amendment in the land of Thomas Jefferson, is not a crime. He deserves all our support.
>via: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/john-pilger-swedes-are-smea...
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119 COMMENTSThe Witch Hunt Against Assange Is Turning into an Extremely Dangerous Assault on Journalism Itself
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Whatever the unusual aspects of the case, the Obama administration’s reported plan to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiring with Army Pvt. Bradley Manning to obtain U.S. secrets strikes at the heart of investigative journalism on national security scandals.
That’s because the process for reporters obtaining classified information about crimes of state most often involves a journalist persuading some government official to break the law either by turning over classified documents or at least by talking about the secret information. There is almost always some level of “conspiracy” between reporter and source.
Contrary to what some outsiders might believe, it’s actually quite uncommon for sensitive material to simply arrive “over the transom” unsolicited. Indeed, during three decades of reporting on these kinds of stories, I can only recall a few secret documents arriving that way to me.
In most cases, I played some role – either large or small – in locating the classified information or convincing some government official to divulge some secrets. More often than not, I was the instigator of these “conspiracies.”
My “co-conspirators” typically were well-meaning government officials who were aware of some wrongdoing committed under the cloak of national security, but they were never eager to put their careers at risk by talking about these offenses. I usually had to persuade them, whether by appealing to their consciences or by constructing some reasonable justification for them to help.
Other times, I was sneaky in liberating some newsworthy classified information from government control. Indeed, in 1995, Consortiumnews.com was started as a way to publish secret and top-secret information that I had discovered in the files of a closed congressional inquiry during the chaotic period between the Republicans winning the 1994 elections and their actual takeover of Congress in early 1995.
In December 1994, I asked for and was granted access to supposedly unclassified records left behind by a task force that had looked into allegations that Ronald Reagan’s campaign had sabotaged President Jimmy Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran in 1980.
To my surprise, I discovered that the investigators, apparently in their haste to wrap up their work, had failed to purge the files of all classified material. So, while my “minder” wasn’t paying attention to me, I ran some of the classified material through a copier and left with it in a folder. I later wrote articles about these documents and posted some on the Internet.
Such behavior – whether cajoling a nervous government official to expose a secret or exploiting some unauthorized access to classified material – is part of what an investigative journalist does in covering national security abuses. The traditional rule of thumb has been that it’s the government’s job to hide the secrets and a reporter’s job to uncover them.
In the aftermath of significant leaks, the government often tries to convince news executives to spike or water down the stories “for the good of the country.” But it is the news organization’s ultimate decision whether to comply or to publish.
Historically, most of these leaks have caused the government some short-term embarrassment (although usually accompanied by exaggerated howls of protests). In the long run, however, the public has been served by knowing about some government abuse. Reforms often follow as they did during the Iran-Contra scandal that I was involved in exposing in the 1980s.
A Nixon Precedent
Yet, in the WikiLeaks case – instead of simply complaining and moving on – the Obama administration appears to be heading in a direction not seen since the Nixon administration sought to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers secret history of the Vietnam War in 1971.
In doing so, the Obama administration, which came to power vowing a new era of openness, is contemplating a novel strategy for criminalizing traditional journalistic practices, while trying to assure major U.S. news outlets that they won’t be swept up in the Assange-Manning dragnet.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that federal prosecutors were reviewing the possibility of indicting Assange on conspiracy charges for allegedly encouraging or assisting Manning in extracting “classified military and State Department files from a government computer system.”
The Times article by Charlie Savage notes that if prosecutors determine that Assange provided some help in the process, “they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.
“Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.
“Adrian Lamo, an ex-hacker in whom Private Manning confided and who eventually turned him in, said Private Manning detailed those interactions in instant-message conversations with him. He said the special server’s purpose was to allow Private Manning’s submissions to ‘be bumped to the top of the queue for review.’ By Mr. Lamo’s account, Private Manning bragged about this ‘as evidence of his status as the high-profile source for WikiLeaks.’”
Though some elements of this suspected Assange-Manning collaboration may be technically unique because of the Internet’s role – and that may be a relief to more traditional news organizations like the Times which has published some of the WikiLeaks documents – the underlying reality is that what WikiLeaks has done is essentially “the same wine” of investigative journalism in “a new bottle” of the Internet.
By shunning WikiLeaks as some deviant journalistic hybrid, mainstream U.S. news outlets may breathe easier now but may find themselves caught up in a new legal precedent that could be applied to them later.
As for the Obama administration, its sudden aggressiveness in divining new “crimes” in the publication of truthful information is especially stunning when contrasted with its “see no evil” approach toward openly acknowledged crimes committed by President George W. Bush and his subordinates, including major offenses such as torture, kidnapping and aggressive war.
Holder’s Move
The possibility of an indictment of Assange no longer seems to me like rampant paranoia. Initially, I didn’t believe that the Obama administration was serious in stretching the law to find ways to prosecute Assange and to shut down WikiLeaks.
But then there was the pressure on WikiLeaks’ vendors such as Amazon.com and PayPal along with threats from prominent U.S. political figures, spouting rhetoric about Assange as a “terrorist” comparable to Osama bin Laden and a worthy target of assassination.
Normally, when people engage in such talk of violence, they are the ones who attract the attention of police and prosecutors. In this case, however, the Obama administration appears to be bowing to those who talk loosely about murdering a truth-teller.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that he has taken “significant” steps in the investigation, a possible reference to what an Assange lawyer said he had learned from Swedish authorities about a secret grand jury meeting in Northern Virginia.
The Times reported, “Justice Department officials have declined to discuss any grand jury activity. But in interviews, people familiar with the case said the department appeared to be attracted to the possibility of prosecuting Mr. Assange as a co-conspirator to the leaking because it is under intense pressure to make an example of him as a deterrent to further mass leaking of electronic documents over the Internet.
“By bringing a case against Mr. Assange as a conspirator to Private Manning’s leak, the government would not have to confront awkward questions about why it is not also prosecuting traditional news organizations or investigative journalists who also disclose information the government says should be kept secret — including The New York Times, which also published some documents originally obtained by WikiLeaks.”
In other words, the Obama administration appears to be singling out Assange as an outlier in the journalistic community who is already regarded as something of a pariah. In that way, mainstream media personalities can be invited to join in his persecution without thinking that they might be next.
Though American journalists may understandably want to find some protective cover by pretending that Julian Assange is not like us, the reality is – whether we like it or not – we are all Julian Assange.