DC Trawler

Julian Assange arrested for leaky wick

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NYT:

Police in Britain arrested Julian Assange on Tuesday on a Swedish warrant issued in connection with alleged sex offenses, British police officials said, the latest twist in the drama swirling around the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and its beleaguered founder…

Mr. Assange denies the charges of sexual misconduct said to have been committed while he was in Sweden in August. It was not immediately clear if Mr. Assange would resist extradition to Sweden for questioning by prosecutors there…

The British police statement said Mr. Assange was “accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010…”

The charges involve sexual encounters that two women say began as consensual but became nonconsensual after Mr. Assange was no longer using a condom. Mr. Assange has denied any wrongdoing and suggested that the charges were trumped up in retaliation for his WikiLeaks work, though there is no public evidence to suggest a connection.

You’d think he’d be able to find some documents to that effect, wouldn’t you?

I don’t like the guy and I think he’s a famewhoring hypocrite with delusions of grandeur — as Christopher Hitchens puts it, “an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda” — but something doesn’t seem right about this whole thing. Apparently in Sweden you can commit a crime called “sex by surprise,” which is distinct from rape in some way. So that’s weird. And it took the accusers a while to decide he’d done something wrong. And the charges were already dropped a few months ago, weren’t they?

Well, this will just add to Assange’s “outlaw” legend among his starry-eyed fans. Like Time Magazine

Jim Treacher