By Dave Lindorff
With a grown daughter and a wife, far be it from me to minimize the issue of rape, but to borrow from the Bard, in the case of the “rape” case being alleged against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, currently being held in a British jail without bail pending an extradition request from Stockholm: “Something is rotten in Sweden.”
As I wrote earlier in this publication, the alleged sexual crimes that Assange is currently being sought for by a Swedish prosecutor are:
1. Allegedly failing to halt an act of consensual sexual intercourse when his sex partner and host, Anna Ardin, claims she somehow became aware that the condom he was using had “split” and,
2. Having consensual sex with a second woman a few days later without informing her that he had just been with Ardin, and then, a day later, allegedly refusing to return a phone call on his cell phone, when she tried to call him to ask him to take an STD test. (Assange says he had turned off and was not using his phone for fear he was being traced through it, not that refusing to take a call from a woman one recently slept with should be considered criminal. Cold or even cruel, maybe, but not justification for a rape charge!)
In most countries, including the US and UK, these would not pass the test to be considered a crime, much less qualify as a category of “rape” (fortunately! I also have a teenage son, and I'd hate to think he could someday be charged with rape for a broken condom or for crude behavior!), but Swedish authorities, who in all of this year have only submitted one other request to Interpol for assistance in capturing a sex crimes suspect, asked the international police agency to issue a so-called Red Alert for Assange, who was subsquently asked by police in the UK, where he was staying, to turn himself in or face arrest. (The other Interpol Red Alert sought by Swedish prosecutors was for Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, a 58-year-old Swedish national wanted on multiple charges of alleged sex crimes and crimes against children.)
You have to ask, given that Sweden has the highest per-capital number of reported rape cases in Europe, how it can be that only these two suspects--Wallenkurtz and Assange--are brought to Interpol...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new online alternative newspaper, please go to: ThisCantBeHappening! [1]