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Assange in Sweden: Paving the Way

Three cheers for Swedish justice.

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STOCKHOLM (Rixstep) — Dick Sundevall is the only Swedish journalist who's dared cover the case of Assange in Sweden.

There have been acerbic comments from time to time, but in the Swedish media blackout that continues to this day, there's been no one who's dared speak openly about what everyone else already knows.

After considerable deliberation, he finally linked to the documents in the preliminary investigation, documents that everyone outside the Swedish duckpond has been reading and discussing for years.

Here are his comments on the recent decision by Sweden to finally accede to the Republic of Ecuador and conduct a secure questioning of Julian Assange on the premises of their embassy in London.

Dick Sundevall They say Julian Assange will finally be questioned. We'll see if that's true. There hasn't been much zeal from the Swedish judicial system for the past six years. And he's already been questioned once.

Karin Rosander of the prosecution authority conveyed the following to our wire services.

'This ongoing preliminary investigation began back in 2010. Actually all investigative procedures have been completed, save for questioning the suspect, something which of course is vital: it determines whether we can proceed to trial or not.'

Read again what Karin Rosander said there.

What did she say? Does she not understand that Assange has already been questioned? Or is Karin Rosander trying to hide that fact from us? Assange was questioned before he left Sweden. And the very last thing he told the police in that interrogation was that he was available for further questioning, if they so desired.

But neither the police nor the prosecutor were interested. They had no objection to Assange flying off to London.

That's when the circus began.

For all these years, Assange has openly declared his desire to be interrogated in London. But the Swedish police and prosecutors weren't interested in interrogations abroad - in any and all other cases, yes, but not in this one.

So what did Assange do then? Assange offered to temporarily move from Ecuador's embassy in London to their embassy in Stockholm so he could be interrogated there instead.

But no, Marianne wasn't interested in that either.

And Marianne's excuse? An interrogation can lead to a decision to prosecute, and Marianne couldn't be certain Assange would give up his political asylum to show up for a trial in Sweden.

Since when do prosecutors and police grind to a halt because of something that may happen in the step ahead of the step ahead? It never happens, it's never happened, and it will never otherwise happen. Police investigations carry on as far as they can go, and if there's an obstacle in the road ahead, then they deal with it when they come to it - not beforehand.

So the years go by. Six of them. And finally a Swedish court of appeals had had enough with Marianne Ny. And they told her that if she kept on doing nothing, they planned on quashing her arrest warrant. And then and only then did Marianne spring to action. Reluctantly, Marianne contacted the Ecuador embassy in London. And finally, after numerous mishaps, there's finally to be an interrogation. But again: we shall see.

But if Assange is indeed innocent, why doesn't he come back to Sweden and face justice? Sweden would never turn him over to the war hawks in the US, right? People who naively think like that should try seeing things from Assange's perspective. None of our recent Swedish governments have shown any guts to defy the US.

If you study the documents of the police investigation, you'll see that the case has to be closed - for the simple reason that no crime has been committed.

And if they now actually make it to London and question Assange and declare they've reached the same conclusion, it'll have taken them six years.

'Nostradumbass'

Links to Dick's piece quickly made their way to the Flashback forum; resident poet 'Nostradumbass' quickly took up the baton.

Nostradumbass There you go. More of 'the case should be dropped'. Someone's paving the way - asphalting the escape road out of this quagmire, in a way that minimises criticism (and rather stinging criticism) of our judicial system as much as possible, and helps avoid the inevitable international scandal.

I suspect that once the US VP's spoken to our beloved PM, they'll give the green light for an interrogation as soon as possible, they'll travel to the embassy, they'll come back home, they'll quickly arrive at a decision to close the investigation, and they'll wind it all up with a press release.

The press release of the prosecution authority will go something like this.

Director of Public Prosecution Marianne Ny has today taken the decision to close the preliminary investigation against Julian Paul Assange as regards the alleged 'rape, lesser crime'. After the recent interrogation, we've seen that we've exhausted all our possibilities to continue the investigation towards a court of law. Marianne Ny states:

'It's unfortunate that we couldn't come any further towards prosecution in this case.'

Marianne Ny states that she cannot otherwise comment on the matter, as she is still away from her office on her holiday.

And then Oisín Cantwell will rant and rave about the shortcomings of our dear judicial system, about how Assange is such a cad, about how international conventions of asylum are abused by hardened criminals.

Wolodarski will write in Dagens Nyheter.

'It is a threat to our liberal democracies that Assange cannot be convicted, but our close cooperation with NATO gives other liberal democracies a way to carry on where Sweden's shortcomings have let us down. It is important that our liberal western democracies now review their current freedom of speech legislation so they can prevent further abuse - particularly abuse by citizens of Australia.'

And after a well-staged media tempest in a teacup and a few outbursts on Twitter, Prosecutor-General Anders Perklev will be tasked to investigate what exactly went wrong. Anders Perklev will pick up the phone and place a call to Göran Lambertz, and Göran Lambertz will conduct an investigation of his own and will find that there's been no judicial scandal whatsoever and that no mistakes have been made.

Yet another triumph for our Swedish judicial system.