Free Speech The

December 7, 2010 British Court Denies Bail to Assange in Sex Inquiry (NWO ALREADY IN PLACE) By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL LONDON – Julian Assange, the founder of the beleaguered WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group, was denied bail by a London court in London on Tuesday and said that he would resist extradition to Sweden where he faces questioning in connection with alleged sex offenses. Mr. Assange was ordered to remain in custody until a further court session

on Dec. 14, the latest twist in the drama swirling around WikiLeaks following its publication of leaked documents. Mr.

Assange’s associates said his detention would not alter plans for further disclosures like those it has made in recent months relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and, over the past nine days, disclosing confidential diplomatic messages between the State Department and American representatives abroad. “Today’s actions against our editor-in-chief Julian Assange won’t affect our operations: we will release more cables tonight as normal,” a posting on the WikiLeaks Twitter account said.

The defiant tone seemed to draw ever clearer battle-lines by supporters of Mr. Assange who cast him as a crusader, and foes, including the Obama administration, who have been infuriated by revelations of sensitive material whose publication, his critics say, could threaten American security interests, alliances and lives. Mr.

Assange was arrested by officers from Scotland Yard’s extradition unit when he went to a central London police station by prior agreement with the authorities, the police said. He arrived at the court near the Houses of Parliament on the banks of the River Thames, using a rear entrance to the building to skirt a scrum of television cameras, satellite vans and reporters from Britain, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and many European countries. Mr.

Assange was asked whether he understood that he could consent to be extradited to Sweden. Mr. Assange replied that he did not consent. In a statement earlier on Tuesday, the police said: “Officers from the Metropolitan Police extradition unit have this morning arrested Julian Assange on behalf of the Swedish authorities on suspicion of rape.” Mr. Assange has denied 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. Previously, his British lawyer, Mark Stephens, had suggested that Mr. Assange might resist on the grounds that Swedish authorities could interview him by video-link from Stockholm or at their embassy in London and that the extradition request itself is politically motivated. “It’s about time we got to the end of the day and we got some truth, justice and rule of law,” Mr.

Stephens told reporters on Tuesday. “Julian Assange has been the one in hot pursuit to vindicate himself to clear his good name.” The British police statement said that 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 arrest was made under a European arrest warrant “by appointment at a London police station at 09:30 today,” the statement said.

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. While widely anticipated, the arrest opened an array of new questions about Mr.

Assange’s future, even as the Justice Department in Washington said it was conducting what Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called “a very serious, active, ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature” into the WikiLeaks matter. Since late November, WikiLeaks has been publishing documents from a trove of over 250,000 diplomatic cables. Mr.

Assange has threatened to release many more if legal action is taken against him or his organization. “Over 100,000 people” were given the entire archive of 251,287 cables in encrypted form, Mr. Assange said on Friday in a question-and-answer session on the Web site of the British newspaper The Guardian. “If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically,” Mr. Assange said.

In an article in The Australian newspaper on Tuesday, he also depicted WikiLeaks as a proponent of what he termed scientific journalism, which “allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on.” “That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true?

Did the journalist report it accurately?” he wrote. “Democratic societies need a strong media, and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest.” His arrest came amid mounting challenges to the operation of WikiLeaks, as computer server companies, Amazon.com and PayPal.com, have cut off commercial cooperation with the organization.

Visa said on Tuesday that it had suspended all payments to WikiLeaks pending an investigation of the organization’s business, Reuters reported. The decision appeared to strike a further blow against the organization, which relies on donations made online, and came a day after a Swiss bank froze an account held by Mr. Assange that had been used to collect donations.

As of Monday night, the group had released fewer than 1,000 of the quarter-million State Department cables it had obtained, reportedly from a low-ranking Army intelligence analyst. So far, the group has moved cautiously. The whole archive was made available to five news organizations, including The New York Times. But WikiLeaks has posted only a few dozen cables on its own in addition to matching those made public by the news publications.

According to the State Department’s count, 1,325 cables, or fewer than 1 percent of the total, have been made public by all parties to date. Justice Department prosecutors have been struggling to find a way to indict Mr. Assange since July, when WikiLeaks made public documents on the war in Afghanistan.

But while it is clearly illegal for a government official with a security clearance to give a classified document to WikiLeaks, it is far from clear that it is illegal for the organization to make it public. Perhaps in a warning shot of sorts, WikiLeaks on Monday released a cable from early last year listing sites around the world – from hydroelectric dams in Canada to vaccine factories in Denmark – that are considered crucial to American national security.

Nearly all the facilities listed in the document, including undersea cables, oil pipelines and power plants, could be identified by Internet searches. But the disclosure prompted headlines in Europe and a new denunciation from the State Department, which said in a statement that “releasing such information amounts to giving a targeting list to groups like Al Qaeda.”

Asked later about the cable, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the continuing disclosures posed “real concerns, and even potential damage to our friends and partners around the world.” In recent months, WikiLeaks gave the entire collection of cables to four European publications – Der Spiegel in Germany, El País in Spain, Le Monde in France and The Guardian. The Guardian shared the cable collection with The New York Times.

Since Nov. 28, each publication has been publishing a series of articles about revelations in the cables, accompanied online by the texts of some of the documents. The publications have removed the names of some confidential sources of American diplomats, and WikiLeaks has generally posted the cables with the same redactions. The five publications have announced no plans to make public all the documents. WikiLeaks’s intentions remain unclear.

Reporting was contributed by Scott Shane, Charlie Savage and Brian Knowlton from Washington, and Ravi Somaiya from London. The Wikileaks sex files: How two one-night stands sparked a worldwide hunt for Julian Assange By Richard Pendlebury Last updated at 10:44 AM on 7th December 2010 A winter morning in backwoods Scandinavia and the chime of a church bell drifts across the snowbound town of Enkoping. Does it also toll for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange?

Today, this small industrial centre, 40 miles west of Stockholm, remains best-known – if known at all – as the birthplace of the adjustable spanner. But if extradition proceedings involving Britain are successful, it could soon be rather more celebrated – by the U.S. government at least – as the place where Mr Assange made a catastrophic error. Victim of a honeytrap plot?

Julian Assange denies the accusations of sex crimes, insisting he had consensual sex with his accusors Victim of a honeytrap plot?

Julian Assange denies the accusations of sex crimes, insisting he had consensual sex with his accusors Here, in a first-floor flat in a dreary apartment block, the mastermind behind the leak of more than 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables this month slept with a female admirer whom he had just met at a seminar. She subsequently made a complaint to police. As a result, Assange, believed to be in hiding in England, faces a criminal prosecution and possibly jail.

Last night, a European Arrest Warrant was given by Interpol to Scotland Yard. WikiLeaks boss ‘could be arrested in hours’ after new warrant is issued The Stockholm police want to question him regarding the possible rape of a woman and separate allegations from another Swedish admirer, with whom he was having a concurrent fling. But there remains a huge questi

on mark over the evidence. Many people believe that the 39-year-old Australian-born whistleblower is the victim of a U.S. government dirty tricks campaign. They argue that the whole squalid affair is a sexfalla, which translates loosely from the Swedish as a ‘honeytrap’.

One thing is clear, though: Sweden’s complex rape laws are central to the story. ‘Jessica’ claims she was sexually assaulted by Julian Assange ‘Sarah’ claims she was sexually assaulted by Julian Assange ‘Jessica’ and ‘Sarah’ claim they were sexually assaulted by Julian Assange Using a number of sources including leaked police interviews, we can begin to piece together the sequence of events which led to Assange’s liberty being threatened by Stockholm police rather than Washington, where already

one U.S. politician has called on him to executed for ‘spying’. The story began

on August 11 this year, when Assange arrived in Stockholm. He had been invited to be the key speaker at a seminar on ‘war and the role of the media’, organised by the centre-Left Brotherhood Movement. His point of contact was a female party official, whom we shall refer to as Sarah (her identity must be protected because of the ongoing legal proceedings). An attractive blonde, Sarah was already a well-known ‘radical feminist’.

In her 30s, she had travelled the world following various fashionable causes. While a research assistant at a local university she had not only been the protegee of a militant feminist academic, but held the post of ‘campus sexual equity officer’. Fighting male discrimination in all forms, including sexual harassment, was her forte. Sarah and Assange had never met.

But in a series of internet and telephone conversations, they agreed that during his visit he could stay at her small apartment in central Stockholm. She said she would be away from the city until the day of the seminar itself.

The prosecution’s case has several puzzling flaws, and there is scant public evidence of rape or sexual molestation What happened over the next few days – while casting an extraordinary light on the values of the two women involved – suggests that even if the WikiLeaks founder is innocent of any charges, he is certainly a man of strong sexual appetites who is not averse to exploiting his fame.

Certainly his stay was always going to be a very social affair, mingling with like-minded and undoubtedly admiring people. That Thursday, he held court at the Beirut Cafe in Stockholm, dining with fellow ‘open government’ campaigners and an American journalist. The following afternoon, Sarah returned to Stockholm, 24 hours earlier than planned. In an interview she later gave to police, she is reported to have said: ‘He (Assange) was there when I came home.

We talked a little and decided that he could stay.’ The pair went out for dinner together at a nearby restaurant. Afterwards they returned to her flat and had sex. What is not disputed by either of them is that a condom broke – an event which, as we shall see, would later take on great significance. At the time, however, the pair continued to be friendly enough the next day, a Saturday, with Sarah even throwing a party for him at her home in the evening.

That same day, Assange attended his seminar at the Swedish trade union HQ. In the front row of the audience, dressed in an eye-catching pink jumper – you can see her on a YouTube internet clip recorded at the time – was a pretty twentysomething whom we shall call Jessica. She was the woman – who two sources this week told me is a council employee – from Enkoping. Swedes are calling the whole squalid affair a honeytrap, a plot to bring down the Wikileaks supremo.

Jessica would later tell police that she had first seen Assange on television a few weeks before. She had found him ‘interesting, brave and admirable’. As a result, she began to follow the WikiLeaks saga, and when she discovered that he was due to visit Stockholm she contacted the Brotherhood Movement to volunteer to help out at the seminar. Although her offer was not taken up, she decided to attend the seminar anyway and took a large number of photos of Assange during his 90-minute talk.

It is believed that by happenstance Jessica also met Sarah – the woman with whom Assange had spent the night – during the meeting. Afterwards, she hung around and was still there when Assange – who has a child from a failed relationship around 20 years ago – left with a group of male friends for lunch. Sources conflict here. One says that she asked to tag along; another that Assange invited her to join them.

Subsequently, one of Assange’s friends recalled that Jessica had been ‘very keen’ to get Assange’s attention. She was later to tell police that, at the restaurant, Assange put his arm around her shoulder. ‘I was flattered. It was obvious that he was flirting,’ she reportedly said. The attraction was mutual. After lunch, the pair went to the cinema to see a film called Deep Sea. Jessica’s account suggests that were ‘intimate’ and then went to a park where Assange told her she was ‘attractive’.

But he had to leave to go to a ‘crayfish party’, a traditional, and usually boozy, Swedish summer event. Jessica asked if they would meet again. ‘Of course,’ said the WikiLeaks supremo. They parted and she took a train