TurboJourno
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/LL09Aa01.html
http://www.anorak.co.uk/256861/media/julian-assange-loses-his-cool-to-rape-victim-anna-ardin-wilikleaks-is-scooped.html
Julian Assange Loses His Cool To ‘Rape Victim’ Anna Ardin – Wikileaks Is Scooped
ANNA Ardin is, as alleged in numerous reports, the woman who claims Wikileaks founder Julian Assange sexually molested her. Hers is, apparently, the story Wikileaks was scooped on.Is it a plot to undo Assange and Wikileaks? If it is a plot, it is clever. Assange and his site possess an otherwordliness. They operate beyond the normal confines. But if he can be pinned down – and on top of a woman – the allure is lost. Wikileaks is no longer cool. It becomes irrelevant.
What do we know about Anna Ardin? On her old blog page – now deleted, Ardin writes a mini bio:
My feminist reflections and comments on animal rights, Swedish politics and Cuba from a political scientist, Christian left and long distance runner will from now on be published at http://annaardin.wordpress.com“
Gawker tells us:
Anna Ardin, thepolitical secretary and press officer of the Swedish “Brotherhood Movement,” a group of Christians from the Social Democratic Party controversial for inviting anti-Semitic speakers to the country
They had also invited Assange to speak.
Nicholas John Mead looks at the organs behind the news:
Assange has been in Sweden to arrange this deal and also agreed to write a column for centre-left Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet (the main rival to Expressen who “broke” this “story”), the first of which was due to be released today. Incidentally, Aftonbladet have decided to postpone publication in the light of the rape allegations.
Assange is duly interviewed by Aftonbladet:
Have you had sex with them?
“Their identities have been made anonymous so even I have no idea who they are.”
Have you had sex at all during your stay in Sweden?
This is something I am entitled to keep private and also to preserve the privacy of the women.
But is it not best in this situation to be as transparent as possible?
Yes, but I do not want to drag people’s private lives through the dirt without having the whole situation clear to me.Why have they turned to the police? What lies behind their actions? What I can say is that I have never, either in Sweden or in any other country, had sex with someone that they haven’t consented to.
…
What do you think of the police and the prosecutor’s conduct?
Nobody has asked me about my version of the story.
What is your side of the story?
I want to know more about what I am accused of before I say anything about it.
You are suspected of molestation.
Nothing I have done applies to this allegation.
How would you sum up this Saturday?
Neither the prosecutors or police have been in contact with me. However, I’m glad that the Swedish authorities quickly checked the women’s stories and struck-down allegations of rape. Apparently it is because a prosecutor with a higher rank took over the investigation and changed the decision to arrest me. The first prosecutor should be criticized however as well as the media who have blindly reported on the allegations.
So. Is it all a conspiracy to smear Assange, as some might suppose? Some of Wikileaks servers are based in Sweden. The rape allegation was reported and then dismissed in the public eye.
One site serves this up as evidence:
Mattias Ardin – a cusin of Anna Ardin is a soldier in Afganistan. The CIA conection is hot again.
It’s not much to go on, is it?
On her now deleted wordpress blog, Anna Ardin has a piece on revenge:
One reason for revengeI’ve been thinking about some revenge over the last few days and came across a very good side who inspired me to this seven-point revenge instruction in Swedish.
We have no idea is Anna Ardin was molested or not. All we know is that the story is out there. In interview, one of the women tells us, cryptically
One of two women involved told Aftonbladet in an interview published today that she had never intended Assange to be charged with rape. She was quoted as saying: “It is quite wrong that we were afraid of him. He is not violent and I do not feel threatened by him.”Speaking anonymously, she said each had had voluntary relations with Assange: “The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who had attitude problems with women.”Sources close to the woman said that issues arose during the relationships about Assange’s willingness to use condoms.
No hiding place for Wikileaks. No leaks.
In her interview, she dismissed the idea, seized on by many conspiracy theorists that ‘dirty tricks’ lay behind the rape allegations, because of WikiLeaks’ defiance of the US government. She said: “The charges against Assange are of course not orchestrated by the Pentagon.”
And on its goes. And the more it goes on, the more Assange loses his cool of an international man of mystery and begins to look like a normal techie with a website and a hard on…
http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php?301387-Anna-Ardin-and-Sofia-Wilen
http://brainz.org/who-sofia-wilen/
http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php?301387-Anna-Ardin-and-Sofia-Wilen
Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen
// * Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here. Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities. In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”
However we do not have to accept the single-bullet theory. Life is more complicated than that. In addition to her anti-Castro, pro-CIA streak, Anna Ardin apparently indulges in her favorite sport of male-bashing. A Swedish forum reports that she is an expert on sexual harassment and the male “master suppression techniques”. Once, as she was lecturing, a male student in the audience looked at his notes instead of staring at her. Anna Ardin reported him for sexual harassment because he discriminated against her for being a woman and because she claimed he made use of the male “master suppression technique” in trying to make her feel invisible. As soon as the student learned about her complaint, he contacted her to apologize and explain himself. Anna Ardin’s response was to once again report him for sexual harassment, again because he was using the “master suppression technique”, this time to belittle her feelings.
Ardin is apparently involved with a “Christian” Social-Democrat group. The Swedish church has a precious few male priests: what was once the struggle for female equality has ended up with men being effectively removed from service. Nowadays very few Swedish male-female couples marry in the church, or get married at all; most Swedish gay couples, however, are proud to become “man and wife” in the church. This is all good news for wealthy Swedes: deserted churches sell their properties (once enjoyed by the community) to be fenced off by the nouveau riche created by the latest privatization wave. So much for Swedish social democracy!
The second accuser, Sofia Wilen, 26, is Anna’ friend. Here is a video of an Assange press conference where one can see the girls together. Those present at the conference marveled at her groupie-like behavior. Though rock stars are used to girls dying to have sex with them, it is much less common in the harsh field of political journalism. Sofia worked hard to bed Assange, according to her own confession; she was also the first to complain to police. She is little known and her motives are vague. Why might a young woman (who shares her life with American artist Seth Benson) pursue such a sordid political adventure?//
http://brainz.org/who-sofia-wilen/
Who Is Sofia Wilén?
Evidence is mounting that Sofia Wilén and her associate Anna Ardin pre-planned "revenge" on Julian Assange by setting him up for false rape allegations. The primary mastermind behind the setup is thought to be Ardin.
Interestingly, the mainstream media has yet to pick up on the fact that Sofia Wilén and her friend Anna Ardin, two friends, seem to have conspired against Assange. Whether this scheme goes deeper than two individuals, to the level of government involvement is yet to be seen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/world/europe/24wikileaks.html?_r=1
Plotting Doubted in WikiLeaks Case
Interestingly, the mainstream media has yet to pick up on the fact that Sofia Wilén and her friend Anna Ardin, two friends, seem to have conspired against Assange. Whether this scheme goes deeper than two individuals, to the level of government involvement is yet to be seen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/world/europe/24wikileaks.html?_r=1
Plotting Doubted in WikiLeaks Case
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: August 23, 2010
Related
The Lede Blog: Decision on Assange Charge Approaches (August 23, 2010)
Mr. Assange had suggested over the weekend that the tortured sequence of events at the Stockholm prosecutor’s office had been prompted by the Pentagon as part of what he called a program of “dirty tricks to ruin us.” The prosecutors had issued a warrant for Mr. Assange’s arrest on suspicion of rape on Friday night, which was followed within 24 hours by the cancellation of the warrant and a formal retraction of the implication that a rape had occurred.
But the conspiratorial view has found no backing from the prosecutor’s office, where the senior prosecutor in charge of the case, Eva Finne, said Monday that nothing she knew of the case suggested that there had been any outside involvement in the events that led the two women to make their accusations against Mr. Assange.
“I have no indication at all in that direction,” Ms. Finne said in a telephone interview in which she confirmed that a lesser charge mentioned in the original prosecutor’s statement — molestation of the two women — remained under investigation.
She said she hoped to decide by the end of the week whether to proceed with a molestation charge against Mr. Assange, which carries a maximum penalty under Swedish law of a year in prison.
The developments over the weekend set off a new flurry of the interest that has focused on WikiLeaks and its founder after the organization posted 77,000 secret Pentagon documents on the Afghan war on the Internet in late July.
The Defense Department’s general counsel, Jeh Charles Johnson, said last week that WikiLeaks had acted illegally in obtaining the secret documents and thousands of others that it has not yet posted on the Web, and Justice Department lawyers have been exploring the possibility of criminal charges against WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange.
Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, left Britain for Sweden this month as the long-distance confrontation with United States authorities intensified, saying he intended to establish a more secure base for himself and WikiLeaks under the wide protections afforded to whistle-blowers by Swedish law. The organization already had a strong base of support here, and it uses Sweden as a base for some of the multiple Web servers it uses to store and disseminate its caches of secret documents.
Mr. Assange and one of the two women, an activist in her early30s who is associated with a group that works with WikiLeaks in Sweden, did not respond to requests for interviews on Sunday and Monday. Efforts to contact the second woman, an artist who is in her mid-20s, were also unsuccessful.
Around the time the rape accusation was made, Mr. Assange traveled to northern Sweden, where he remains, according to an account he gave on Sunday to the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet. The newspaper announced recently that it planned to establish a formal relationship with Mr. Assange as a contributing columnist, an arrangement that friends said would enable him to acquire a work permit to stay in Sweden.
In the interview, he declined to answer questions about his relationships with the two women.
“I don’t want to drag anybody’s private life into the dirt without first understanding the whole situation clearly,” he said. “Why are they going to the police? What’s behind it? What I can say is that I have never, in Sweden or any other country, had sex with someone in a way that did not build on total consent from both sides.”
He contended in the interview, as he has in Twitter feeds and e-mails, that the accusations of sexual impropriety involved “dirty tricks.”
“I don’t know what’s behind this,” he said. “But we have been warned that the Pentagon, for example, is thinking of deploying dirty tricks to ruin us. And I have also been warned about sex traps.”
He added that he thought WikiLeaks had suffered “major damage” from the allegations. “There have been headlines all across the world that I am suspected of rape,” he said. “They do not disappear. And I know from experience that WikiLeaks’ enemies continue to trumpet things even after they have been retracted.”
But one of Mr. Assange’s close friends in Sweden, who said he had discussed the case in detail with Mr. Assange and one of the women, said he was “absolutely sure” that what was involved were personal animosities and grievances that flowed out of brief relationships Mr. Assange had with the women.
The man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issues, said that the volatile mix that led to the two women’s seeking criminal charges against Mr. Assange involved his celebrity in Sweden and the ill feelings that erupted when the two women discovered they had been competing for his attentions.
“This wasn’t anything to do with the Pentagon,” he said. “It was just a personal matter between three people that got out of hand.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles
EXCERPT:
The administration of President George W. Bush refused to extradite Posada to Venezuela, where he is wanted for this crime.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1833961,00.html
When Posada was detained after sneaking into the United States from Mexico in 2005, the U.S. could have extradited him to Venezuela to face charges in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed all 73 persons aboard. He denies involvement, but declassified FBI documents implicate him in the crime. (A questionable military trial in Venezuela had acquitted Posada of the bombing charge and he was in jail awaiting a civilian retrial when he escaped from that country in 1985.) This time, federal prosecutors opted to try him on charges of lying about how he got into the U.S. Even so, Posada was released last year after a federal judge in El Paso, Texas, dismissed his case in part because of poor translation during Posada's interview with immigration officials. The decision left many legal experts shaking their heads.
Since then, the 80-year-old Cuban exile has lived with relatives in Miami, a free man — prompting critics to call it hypocritical for the U.S. to give Posada a pass while sentencing Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Ahmed Hamden, to 66 months in prison this month for providing material support to al-Qaeda. "By any reasonable definition, [Posada] is a terrorist," says Dennis Jett, a former U.S. ambassador to Peru and now a professor at Pennsylvania State University's international affairs school. "He may not be a threat to the U.S., but he is to the people he's [allegedly] been attacking."
Last week, however, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rescinded Posada's go-free card, reversing the El Paso judge's ruling. Now the anti-Castro militant, who has also been linked to 1997 bombings of tourist sites in Cuba that killed an Italian man (a charge he later denied), could be facing life behind bars again — if, that is, the Bush Administration hauls him back into detention and continues to pursue its immigration case. It's unclear whether the Texas court will reinstate his bond, and Posada's Miami attorney, Arturo V. Hernandez, says he'll appeal the latest court ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. Hernandez says that during his client's detention in El Paso, part of it in isolation, Posada dropped a lot of weight and "has not been in great health. He's being treated for a number of medical issues that one would expect in [an elderly] male who hasn't exactly had a tranquil life."
Posada's life does read like a tropical spy novel. Though he maintains Venezuelan citizenship, he has worked often with the U.S. since Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, serving in the Army and then assisting the CIA in adventures like the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Iran-Contra operation under President Reagan. In 1990, gunmen believed to be Cuban agents shot him several times in the face and torso in Guatemala but failed to kill him. Through it all, as recently declassified FBI and CIA documents indicate, he has been accused of taking part in terrorist activities like the 1976 Cuban airline bombing and a conspiracy to assassinate Castro in Panama in 2000. Posada and three other men were convicted and imprisoned for the assassination plot, but were pardoned in 2005 by then Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso.
This summer, Panama's Supreme Court overturned that pardon, and Panamanian officials must now decide whether to seek Posada's extradition from the U.S. If they do, it would be hard for the U.S. to ignore international opinion and not hand him over. Given the bitter relations between Washington and Havana, it would simply look as though the Bush Administration were ignoring its own uncompromising anti-terrorist tenets in order to spite Castro. A U.S. immigration judge ruled that Posada would likely be tortured if he is sent to Venezuela — which is ruled by the pro-Castro government of left-wing President Hugo Chavez; that argument, however, can hardly be made with regard to Panama. (Chavez has insisted his government would never mistreat Posada.)
Others feel the federal appeals court should have gone even further and reprimanded the Administration for treating Posada like an immigration scofflaw instead of a man widely considered an international terrorist. "I worry that these cases... have the tendency to make very bad law," says Miami attorney and immigration law expert Ira Kurzban. The U.S., he insists, shouldn't be "willing to tolerate terrorists as long as they are your friends."
(For its part, the Bush Administration suggests that the Venezuelan government is hardly in a position to lecture the U.S. about double standards given Chavez's own unabashed support of Colombia's Marxist FARC guerrillas, which both Washington and the European Union have designated as terrorists. Though Chavez denies it, laptop computers seized from FARC commanders indicate Chavez has given the rebels, best known today for their kidnapping and drug-trafficking activities, significant political and financial aid.)
Either way, Posada remains in Miami keeping a low profile. Occasionally his critics will demonstrate against him on the streets of Little Havana, sometimes leading to verbal confrontations with his supporters. But that noise dies down fairly quickly. After last week's ruling, however, Posada may find himself once again leaving Miami for the legal maelstrom.
But the conspiratorial view has found no backing from the prosecutor’s office, where the senior prosecutor in charge of the case, Eva Finne, said Monday that nothing she knew of the case suggested that there had been any outside involvement in the events that led the two women to make their accusations against Mr. Assange.
“I have no indication at all in that direction,” Ms. Finne said in a telephone interview in which she confirmed that a lesser charge mentioned in the original prosecutor’s statement — molestation of the two women — remained under investigation.
She said she hoped to decide by the end of the week whether to proceed with a molestation charge against Mr. Assange, which carries a maximum penalty under Swedish law of a year in prison.
The developments over the weekend set off a new flurry of the interest that has focused on WikiLeaks and its founder after the organization posted 77,000 secret Pentagon documents on the Afghan war on the Internet in late July.
The Defense Department’s general counsel, Jeh Charles Johnson, said last week that WikiLeaks had acted illegally in obtaining the secret documents and thousands of others that it has not yet posted on the Web, and Justice Department lawyers have been exploring the possibility of criminal charges against WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange.
Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, left Britain for Sweden this month as the long-distance confrontation with United States authorities intensified, saying he intended to establish a more secure base for himself and WikiLeaks under the wide protections afforded to whistle-blowers by Swedish law. The organization already had a strong base of support here, and it uses Sweden as a base for some of the multiple Web servers it uses to store and disseminate its caches of secret documents.
Mr. Assange and one of the two women, an activist in her early30s who is associated with a group that works with WikiLeaks in Sweden, did not respond to requests for interviews on Sunday and Monday. Efforts to contact the second woman, an artist who is in her mid-20s, were also unsuccessful.
Around the time the rape accusation was made, Mr. Assange traveled to northern Sweden, where he remains, according to an account he gave on Sunday to the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet. The newspaper announced recently that it planned to establish a formal relationship with Mr. Assange as a contributing columnist, an arrangement that friends said would enable him to acquire a work permit to stay in Sweden.
In the interview, he declined to answer questions about his relationships with the two women.
“I don’t want to drag anybody’s private life into the dirt without first understanding the whole situation clearly,” he said. “Why are they going to the police? What’s behind it? What I can say is that I have never, in Sweden or any other country, had sex with someone in a way that did not build on total consent from both sides.”
He contended in the interview, as he has in Twitter feeds and e-mails, that the accusations of sexual impropriety involved “dirty tricks.”
“I don’t know what’s behind this,” he said. “But we have been warned that the Pentagon, for example, is thinking of deploying dirty tricks to ruin us. And I have also been warned about sex traps.”
He added that he thought WikiLeaks had suffered “major damage” from the allegations. “There have been headlines all across the world that I am suspected of rape,” he said. “They do not disappear. And I know from experience that WikiLeaks’ enemies continue to trumpet things even after they have been retracted.”
But one of Mr. Assange’s close friends in Sweden, who said he had discussed the case in detail with Mr. Assange and one of the women, said he was “absolutely sure” that what was involved were personal animosities and grievances that flowed out of brief relationships Mr. Assange had with the women.
The man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issues, said that the volatile mix that led to the two women’s seeking criminal charges against Mr. Assange involved his celebrity in Sweden and the ill feelings that erupted when the two women discovered they had been competing for his attentions.
“This wasn’t anything to do with the Pentagon,” he said. “It was just a personal matter between three people that got out of hand.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles
EXCERPT:
The administration of President George W. Bush refused to extradite Posada to Venezuela, where he is wanted for this crime.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1833961,00.html
When America's Ally is a Terrorist
Anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles is led by Federal US Marshals into the Texas Western District Court, 2007, in El Paso, Texas.
Armando Segovia / AFP / Getty
When Posada was detained after sneaking into the United States from Mexico in 2005, the U.S. could have extradited him to Venezuela to face charges in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed all 73 persons aboard. He denies involvement, but declassified FBI documents implicate him in the crime. (A questionable military trial in Venezuela had acquitted Posada of the bombing charge and he was in jail awaiting a civilian retrial when he escaped from that country in 1985.) This time, federal prosecutors opted to try him on charges of lying about how he got into the U.S. Even so, Posada was released last year after a federal judge in El Paso, Texas, dismissed his case in part because of poor translation during Posada's interview with immigration officials. The decision left many legal experts shaking their heads.
Since then, the 80-year-old Cuban exile has lived with relatives in Miami, a free man — prompting critics to call it hypocritical for the U.S. to give Posada a pass while sentencing Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Ahmed Hamden, to 66 months in prison this month for providing material support to al-Qaeda. "By any reasonable definition, [Posada] is a terrorist," says Dennis Jett, a former U.S. ambassador to Peru and now a professor at Pennsylvania State University's international affairs school. "He may not be a threat to the U.S., but he is to the people he's [allegedly] been attacking."
Last week, however, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rescinded Posada's go-free card, reversing the El Paso judge's ruling. Now the anti-Castro militant, who has also been linked to 1997 bombings of tourist sites in Cuba that killed an Italian man (a charge he later denied), could be facing life behind bars again — if, that is, the Bush Administration hauls him back into detention and continues to pursue its immigration case. It's unclear whether the Texas court will reinstate his bond, and Posada's Miami attorney, Arturo V. Hernandez, says he'll appeal the latest court ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. Hernandez says that during his client's detention in El Paso, part of it in isolation, Posada dropped a lot of weight and "has not been in great health. He's being treated for a number of medical issues that one would expect in [an elderly] male who hasn't exactly had a tranquil life."
Posada's life does read like a tropical spy novel. Though he maintains Venezuelan citizenship, he has worked often with the U.S. since Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, serving in the Army and then assisting the CIA in adventures like the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Iran-Contra operation under President Reagan. In 1990, gunmen believed to be Cuban agents shot him several times in the face and torso in Guatemala but failed to kill him. Through it all, as recently declassified FBI and CIA documents indicate, he has been accused of taking part in terrorist activities like the 1976 Cuban airline bombing and a conspiracy to assassinate Castro in Panama in 2000. Posada and three other men were convicted and imprisoned for the assassination plot, but were pardoned in 2005 by then Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso.
This summer, Panama's Supreme Court overturned that pardon, and Panamanian officials must now decide whether to seek Posada's extradition from the U.S. If they do, it would be hard for the U.S. to ignore international opinion and not hand him over. Given the bitter relations between Washington and Havana, it would simply look as though the Bush Administration were ignoring its own uncompromising anti-terrorist tenets in order to spite Castro. A U.S. immigration judge ruled that Posada would likely be tortured if he is sent to Venezuela — which is ruled by the pro-Castro government of left-wing President Hugo Chavez; that argument, however, can hardly be made with regard to Panama. (Chavez has insisted his government would never mistreat Posada.)
Others feel the federal appeals court should have gone even further and reprimanded the Administration for treating Posada like an immigration scofflaw instead of a man widely considered an international terrorist. "I worry that these cases... have the tendency to make very bad law," says Miami attorney and immigration law expert Ira Kurzban. The U.S., he insists, shouldn't be "willing to tolerate terrorists as long as they are your friends."
(For its part, the Bush Administration suggests that the Venezuelan government is hardly in a position to lecture the U.S. about double standards given Chavez's own unabashed support of Colombia's Marxist FARC guerrillas, which both Washington and the European Union have designated as terrorists. Though Chavez denies it, laptop computers seized from FARC commanders indicate Chavez has given the rebels, best known today for their kidnapping and drug-trafficking activities, significant political and financial aid.)
Either way, Posada remains in Miami keeping a low profile. Occasionally his critics will demonstrate against him on the streets of Little Havana, sometimes leading to verbal confrontations with his supporters. But that noise dies down fairly quickly. After last week's ruling, however, Posada may find himself once again leaving Miami for the legal maelstrom.
