Comments

1
I think your friend meant Naomi Wolf, if he meant the Huffington Post piece.
2
Your friend is stupid. Assange is not charged with treason, and his case bears zero resemblance to Dreyfus. Five seconds of research into court procedures or even just reading a newspaper article would reveal a great deal.

Naomi Klein is an idiot.
3
Dreyfus affair? Huh?
4
Did you mean Zola instead of Proust? Zola wrote the famous "J'accuse" article in reference to the Dreyfus affair. But maybe Proust wrote about it, too - I could never get through more than a paragraph or two of Proust before my brain fell asleep.
5
The grasping-at-strawsiness of the Assange/Dreyfus comparison aside, I'm stumped by the phrase "Proust of our moment".
6
Charles,
@4 is correct. It was Emile Zola who wrote about "L'Affaire Dreyfus". Indeed, the comparison is feeble. Alfred Dreyfus was a French Army officer who was wrongly accused & imprisoned/exiled off to Devil's Island for treason. He did no wrong whatsoever (we don't know that about Julian Assange yet) and was essentially condemned because he was Jewish during a time of great anti-Semitic prevalence in 3rd Republic France. Upon release he remained a loyal French officer & served in WWI. Assange is a civilian and accused of rape. Yes, there are some in Congress that want to prosecute him for disclosure of state secrets but I believe it is a weak case.
7
Both are correct.

I hear Julian's coming to SLOG Happy tonite.
8
@4 and @6 Proust was also deeply concerned with the Dreyfus affair. Volumes three and four of Remembrance of Things Past deal with the case and the social stratification seen in the variety of reactions to Dreyfus in many different ways. But it I agree that the connection to Assange is really very murky, at best.
9
i guess if Assange is Dreyfus then Manning would be???

perhaps um, this guy?
10

Assange had sex with Richard Dryfus?

That guy is really a mook!

http://www.nndb.com/people/814/000022748…

11
Apologies to Naomi Klein. Naomi Wolf is the moron.

Especially having read that article of hers at HuffPo. It is deeply uninformed. She seems to be confused about the possibility that, say, Sierra Leone may have different laws than Sweden, and she's completely ignorant of how the new EAW works. It is indeed used constantly, every day, for the most trivial of offenses, including many that are not crimes in the country where the person is arrested. Britain deports three people a day under the EAW.

Assange is not getting special treatment; he's caught in the same mill as many, many others. I expect to see quite a lot of attention paid to the EAW in coming months, as fallout from this.
12
You can't even begin to compare Assange to Richard Dreyfuss.

Dreyfuss was arrested on trumped up charges because he was Jewish and charged with treason, even though there was no real evidence he was anything but a loyal officer.

Assange is accused of releasing classified U.S. government documents - which is true, and is in fact a crime, even if some people don't think it should be. On top of that, he's also wanted on suspicion of rape.

How could you even begin to compare them?
13
@12 - Huh, if it's a crime, you think the US would be trying to prosecute him already. Weird.
14
@12, Richard Dreyfuss was arrested on trumped up charges not for treason, but in retaliation for "Moon Over Parador." You be the judge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a123Dpj6T…
15
Assange was not the one releasing the classified documents-his sources were the ones who released them.
16
first pic, tag team drummer girls. yay! fuck tuba boy and his "musique". he's an artiste you know.
17
*My bad. I read the earlier comments/jokes about Richard Dreyfuss and got my names mixed up.

The correct name is, of course, Alfred Dreyfus.
18
@12, Assange is NOT accused of releasing any documents or anything else associated with Wikileaks. He might be in the future, but his current legal difficulties have nothing to do with Wikileaks at all.

He's accused of four counts of rape according to Swedish law. The reason Britain is involved is because Sweden submitted those charges using a European Address Warrant, which is a fairly new (and controversial) thing meant to ease extradition between European countries, which is what it's being used for here.

The reason Assange was still being held despite having his bail granted is that Sweden appealed the granting of bail. That's their right. Today the British judge heard that appeal and rejected it, which meant that Assange was free to go. He's still got court hearings to further process the EAW, but he will probably be in Sweden soon.

Once he's in Sweden, he'll face trial. For all the sturm und drang about how Sweden is the US's lapdog and their legal system is a total sham, yadda yadda, the fact is, their legal system is as well suited to determining his guilt or innocence on the four rape charges as anyone's.

Everything is above board. Everything is according to established procedure. As I mentioned, Britain deports an average of three people a day on EAWs, including one Polish gentleman who was "guilty" only of having overdrawn his bank account ten years -- a crime in Poland but nowhere else.

I think it's pretty unlikely that the US will press charges against Assange for anything Wkileaks-related, since he's not a US citizen and didn't leak the documents in the US. We'll see. But that still has nothing to do with what you're seeing here, which is bog-standard legal maneuvering. In fact, Assange, because he's got better lawyers, is getting much better treatment through the EAW than most people do. If he was Joe Blow, he'd be in a Swedish jail already.

If I had to guess, I'd say he's probably going to be found guilty, and will probably serve six months or a year in Swedish jail. But a judge or jury will determine that.
19
Here's the Slatest:

Justice Department officials are figuring out how to charge Assange with conspiracy, and according to the UK Independent, they're trying to do it through Bradley Manning, the army intelligence specialist accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of confidential documents to the whistleblowing organization.

Independent: U.S. Offers Manning Plea Deal to Name Assange
http://slatest.slate.com/id/2278367/
20
Manning is being tortured, I consider solitary confinement and deprivation associated with it to be torture. Tortured individuals have been known to say anything to make the torture stop. I can't believe we are going after the messenger here, instead of dealing with the real issues. Sunlight is an excellent sanitizer, covering things up will only increase necrotising.

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.