Assange Case: Flashback Surpasses 50,000 Posts

The forum thread on the Julian Assange case reaches a milestone.

Get It Try It

NEW YORK CITY/STOCKHOLM — The world-famous Flashback forum discussion thread on the Assange legal case in Sweden has now reached 50,000 posts and shows no signs of slowing down.

The thread has now over 50,000 posts on over 4,000 pages and has to date over 4,600,000 views. This primarily in a language spoken fluently by only some 8,000,000 residents.

Flashback is today run from New York City to protect freedom of speech. The forum has over 700,000 registered members.

There are anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 or more members online at any one time day or night. The forum now has nearly 40,000,000 posts all told.

But the Assange thread - the main one of many - has by far the most views and posts of any Flashback thread ever. Anything that's happened or in the future will happen in the Assange case can be found at Flashback. Many of the major milestones in the case were first published and discovered at Flashback.

The thread has been built up by members of the Swedish judiciary, Sweden's political parties, forensic examiners, and is used regularly by the international mainstream media, and is the single greatest source of information in the ongoing controversy.

Post #1

The story begins in the wee hours of Saturday morning 21 August 2010. A Swedish tabloid published the first headline about Assange at 06:00 and twenty five minutes later the Flashback thread began.

The first post by Darkwand on the Assange case 25 minutes after the first headline hit the web. 'WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sought by the police suspected on probable cause of rape in Stockholm, now it remains to be seen if he's a cad or if it's the CIA behind it.'

There were suspicions right from post #1 that things weren't as they appeared to be.

Post #50,000

Post #50,000 came in the early evening of 5 November 2012 - over two years and two months later.

Post #50,000 by BaalZeBub over two years and two months later.

Milestones

As collated by trenterx.

Here's a quick summary of 50,000 posts.

The affair is beginning to take the form of a Greek tragedy with the following dramatis personae:

1. Assange and WikiLeaks planned to make Sweden their base of operations, with Swedish servers, Swedish residence permit, publisher's permit for a Swedish Internet news site which permitted publication of leaks protected by Swedish legislation for freedom of the press where it's illegal to even try to trace sources. Assange's visit to Sweden was the first step in this plan.

2. The US government exerted considerable pressure on Sweden at the same time to stop WikiLeaks from establishing their base here, and began shortly thereafter with their secret grand jury which ultimately led to their sealed indictment against Assange.

3. The two women AA and SW both 'hit on' Assange for personal and/or political reasons. The HIV phobia of SW was exploited to first pressure Assange, then as an excuse to visit the police. But once they'd arrived, they immediately began describing two similar rapes. The about-face of AA from an admirer of Assange to a conniving revenger takes place on Thursday 19 August for reasons which are not clear (perhaps pressure was brought to bear on her).

4. Police, prosecutor, and a plaintiff attorney exploit the situation to the full and inflate the stories of the two women to one case of rape and five further cases of sex crimes (reduced to four by the high court). By use of the European Arrest Warrant and Interpol, the Swedish justice system has, on very flimsy grounds, gone far beyond normal legal praxis, and through stubborn behaviour for the past two years has succeeded in derailing the entire process which finally ends in a stalemate.

5. Sweden's government may have been pulled into the affair reluctantly, but their foreign office [headed by Carl Bildt] approved the European Arrest Warrant and the prime minister has put himself in an untenable position by insisting the country's judicial system cannot have made a mistake and by not letting the government take any initiative to break the deadlock. By all indications, Sweden's government have had continual informal contacts with both the UK and the US in the matters of Assange and WikiLeaks, but next to nothing is known in detail about these communications. The four Swedish security agencies wiretapped and shadowed Assange in Sweden from Day One both digitally and perhaps even on foot.

6. Swedish media have conducted a 'trial by media' campaign. The coterie surrounding Anna Ardin have succeeded in associating Assange with diverse forms of sexual assault through their 'talk about it' campaign, and the Timbro Institute through Roland Poirier Martinsson has simultaneously conducted an outright political campaign against WikiLeaks and Assange. The media climate in Sweden is now extremely negative.

All dramatis personae are on stage from Day One. The storyline is complex, with each new act building on what has gone before. The legal process derailed already on the first day. The Swedish actors seem crippled today. But the current deadlock is perhaps a turning point in this tragedy. All eyes are now on Sweden - the Swedish prosecutor and Sweden's government. What will you do?

See Also
Justice4Assange.com
Assange Defence Fund
WikiLeaks: Support WikiLeaks
The Police Protocol (Translated)
Rixstep: JA/WL (Assange/WikiLeaks)
Rixstep: Assange/WikiLeaks RSS Feed
Radsoft: Assange/WikiLeaks RSS Feed