LATEST ASSANGE

In the on-going SO travails of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks and somebody with whom the US government is surely not amused, a new twist.

You may have noticed over the past week that while some sort of warrant was issued by a lower Swedish court and sent to Interpol, nobody on the planet seemed to know where he was – which was odd on its very face since any organized country on the planet has passport control.

Turns out that Scotland Yard says he’s in England, has been in England, they have been in constant contact with his defense team over the past month and even have his address and phone number where he’s staying in England.

BUT they are waiting for instructions since – wait for it – there is “some confusion over what authorities should do” if they indeed arrest him on the Swedish ‘warrant’.

In a curious and queasy legal whackery that cannot be unfamiliar to members of the SO community, he hasn’t been charged with anything, so this is a warrant for ‘detention for questioning’ (although as his lawyers have said, Swedish prosecutors have had every opportunity to meet with him in England at his expense and have consistently refused).

Remarkably, the Swedish Supreme Court refused an appeal by Assange’s lawyers to vacate the ‘order to detain’ him, but the Brits point out – rather impressively given how things usually go in SO cases – that it’s “not a properly certified warrant” so they can’t act on it.

Now we have seen a whole bunch of official oddness in this case: the two queasily self-proclaimed victims did not make charges, they simply ‘reported’ their experiences and asked the police for ‘advice’; on a weekend, when the junior prosecutor on duty issues a warrant and released his name to the public; then on the Monday morning following a senior prosecutor quashed the whole thing; then some days later an even more senior prosecutor said she was re-opening the investigation; months passed (and he made his latest huge document dump) during which the Swedish prosecutors refused Assange’s offer to come and interview him to their heart’s content at his expense, and then the relevant lower court issued this ‘order to detain for questioning’ a week or so ago, and now Scotland Yard says the Swedish authorities – although this is a case that has gone as high up as the Swedish Supreme Court – have issued a flawed document authorizing the arrest.

I also note that there hasn’t been much brouhaha from the usual advocacy suspects that you would expect in a high-profile sex-offense case; standard operating procedure is that you always jump right into the surf with your ever-waxed board when your cause is blessed with a high-profile perp so as to make sure the spin goes the way you want it to.

Curiouser and curiouser.

But it’s impressive that the Brits are observing legalities – which in Victimist practice is an obstructionist ‘excuse’ and merely commits a further victimization when the police don’t start breaking down legal firewalls in response to a self-reported victim’s allegations.

I’m still curious as to why the Swedes have to have him physically in the country. I’m thinking that it would be easier to intimidate him (another standard gambit), although he doesn’t seem to be the type of person who’s going to buckle under like the average schmuck caught in the sights of the Mania; and he can afford some serious legal counsel.

I would say that matters shouldn’t be so complicated; law is not THIS complicated. At least, decent and reasonable law is not this complicated. But in the murky and treacherous and jellied swamp-mush that is SO Mania Law there are so many queasy and sleazy dynamics operating under the surface even more than above the surface, then things become quite complicated indeed. If for no other reason, governments are up to some skullduggery in SO matters that they’d rather not admit, and so we always seem to be confronted – sorta like Moses and the burning bush – with the report of a major fire and yet no flames. And in this case, the Brit ‘fire department’ isn’t even sure it can respond to the purported alarm.

The SO Mania, held in and for the County of Through-the-Looking-Glass, the Honorable Red Queen presiding. Oyez, oyez!

Oy.