THE MAN WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

Guy Rundle September 26, 2010

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is embroiled in a case worthy of Swedish thriller writer Stieg Larsson.

FOUR years ago, a sometime hacker, based in Melbourne and now gone semi-legit, started a blog to share a few ideas and think out loud about some things. Nothing remarkable about that except the name - IQ.org - a pretty prime piece of real estate, grabbed early in the internet/web/blog explosion.

Like many blogs by people working in IT, it sought to understand political and social realities through mathematical reasoning. Power, it announced, was a conspiracy - even those organisations understood to be open and legit players relied on the essence of conspiracy, which is an imbalance between information inside and outside the group. The more you reduce that imbalance towards zero, the less powerful the conspiracy becomes, even if it has weapons and wealth at its disposal. When information is evenly shared, the conspiracy, by its very nature, ceases to exist.

If this rather clumsily written paper, ''Conspiracy as Governance'', is being read with more interest than most blog posts, it's because the author is one Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, and its now visible, if not legendary, public face.

The Assange myth (ex-hacker, lives in airports, appears computer-generated himself) has now been the subject of innumerable articles, but with WikiLeaks about to launch a massive new cache concerning the Iraq war - a cache rumoured to be as large as 200,000 documents - and major US news networks drawn in to release the most newsworthy items, it was never likely that interest would diminish, especially among the US security apparatus.

Then, stunningly, a month ago, Assange was accused of rape and harassment in Sweden, with the investigation of the rape charges dropped and then revived in the space of a week. The extraordinary coincidence of the charges, coming at a time when Assange was seeking a Swedish residency permit in order to take full protection from the country's journalist shield laws, led many to wonder if the conspiracy was biting back.

This was amplified by the nature of the charges, which can be uniquely damaging to character and reputation, while also quelling full discussion of their veracity or otherwise. With the Iraq war document drop, and a final decision by the Swedish prosecutor's office imminent, it's pretty certain that Assange, the cast of characters around him and his compelling vision of political action will be hitting the news again, very soon.

The public facts of the matter are by now reasonably known: on August 20, two women went to the Klara police station in Stockholm to make complaints against Assange for rape and the particularly Swedish crime of ''ofredande'', best translated as ''infringement'' or ''misconduct''. Ofredande covers a wide range of things, from berating someone in the street, to stalking, to various misconduct between friends or more-than-friends. The subsequently leaked police report detailed that both women made allegations about unsafe sex and an alleged refusal by Assange to take an STI test.

The police opened parallel files on the same incidents, one for rape, the other for misconduct, and a junior fill-in prosecutor issued warrants on both charges. These were then leaked to the Expressen newspaper, making world news headlines on the Friday evening. The news caught the eye of holidaying chief prosecutor Eva Finne, who had the case notes couriered to her and dismissed the rape charge immediately, leaving the misconduct charges standing.

To add to the confusion, one of the complainants told Aftonbladet newspaper that she never wanted Assange charged with rape in the first place, and that ''this was about a guy who has a few problem attitudes to women''.

It is now that things get very strange, because the complainant reveals herself to be Anna Ardin, the political officer/press secretary for the ''the Brotherhood'', a Christian group within the Social Democrats, the party that has dominated Swedish politics and government for a century.

Once rather conservative, the Brotherhood has become a focus for leftish, third-worldish type Christians, and it was Ardin who had organised a series of speaking engagements for Assange. Assange had stayed at Ardin's flat for a week, in the middle of which he had had a dalliance with the second complainant, who had been taking photographs at one of his speaking appearances.

News that Ardin was a complainant rocked the student/youth political milieu, because one of her prior roles had been as gender equality officer in the student union at Uppsala University, Sweden's Oxford. Several months ago, Ardin had also published on her blog a 10-step guide to taking revenge on ex-lovers, one of which was to ''get them in trouble with the law''.

The misconduct Assange was charged with is a misdemeanour, and it appeared that the rape charge had been dissolved. But that week, Ardin and SW (the other complainant) hired leading lawyer Claes Borgstrom to represent them, and Borgstrom petitioned a yet higher prosecutor. Borgstrom is not merely a high-profile brief; he has recently been the Social Democratic party's spokesman on gender equality. The prosecutor he approached was Marianne Ny, head of a special unit on ''crime development'' based in Gothenburg, a unit explicitly tasked with exploring and extending sex crime laws in areas of social behaviour.

On September 1, Ny announced she was re-opening the investigation into the charge of rape. Aftonbladet journalists who asked Borgstrom what the allegation was based on were told there was more evidence than had been revealed in the widely leaked police reports, but he would not disclose what it was.

Assange noted that he was yet to be confronted with any explicit charges of rape and that ''the whole process has gone on without my input''. He hired Sweden's most celebrated lawyer, Leif Silbersky, and then changed representation when it became clear that Silbersky's other case (defending a brace of men charged with a helicopter-based robbery of a bullion warehouse) was taking all his time. Some people think Sweden's boring. God knows why.

With the rape case re-opened, amid great confusion, it was inevitable that Ardin's politics and background would come under scrutiny.

The milieu of hackerdom is not without its conspiracy enthusiasts, who pointed to her stint in the Washington DC branch of the Swedish foreign service, that she had been deported from Cuba for working with the US-backed dissident group The Women in White, and that her close cousin Mattias Ardin is a lieutenant-colonel in Afghanistan.

Others focused on the role of Expressen newspaper, which had been leaked the report of the initial rape charges, in contravention of Swedish law, and then leaked the contents of a later police interview with Assange.

Expressen is right-wing, and has long been opposed to Sweden's policy of armed neutrality, advocating closer ties with the US. According to journalist Israel Shamir, the US threatened to cease sharing intelligence with SEPO, the Swedish secret service, should Assange get residency and be protected under its media shield laws - laws that would specifically frustrate any attempt to extradite Assange to the US.

Others who have tangled with secret services were in no doubt that something was afoot. Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who had been sacked for criticising the US-UK alliance with the highly repressive country, said that ''Julian Assange has been getting the bog-standard 'kompromat''', the old KGB term for sexual compromise. Murray himself had been falsely accused of trading visas for sex. Others were more sceptical, with Mattias Svensson, editor of alternative magazine Neo, saying of arguments about US involvement: ''My instinct is that they're ridiculous''.

One of the country's leading legal commentators, Marten Schultz, argued that the chaotic progress of the case was because of an asymmetry in the Swedish legal system that allows police and prosecutors to leak information and thus damage reputations, while defence lawyers are legally prevented from doing so.

Everyone connected agrees that it's a mess and an embarrassment, and most will say that Assange's rights have been infringed, with leading international lawyer Geoffrey Robertson arguing that the Australian government should ''carpet'' the Swedish ambassador for Assange's treatment, and that Assange should make a case in the European Court of Human Rights.

Will the imminent document drop return attention from the Strindbergian drama of Assange and the two women to the two major wars that have been WikiLeaks' major focus? Even if the rape investigation peters out, it's unlikely.
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-man-who-played-with-fire-20100925-15rof.html