Breaking: Wikileaks Founder Assange Arrested
On sexual assault charges. But, you see, he has been trying so hard to meet with prosecutors and clear his good name:
[Assange’s lawyer] said: “It’s about time we got to the end of the day and we got some truth, justice and rule of law.
“Julian Assange has been the one in hot pursuit to vindicate himself to clear his good name.”
And here I had the idea he was hiding out.
I’d like to see him prosecuted for more than sexual assault, myself.
I saw a news crawl on Bloomberg that I’ve not found the corresponding story for, the crawl stated that Visa had ceased forwarding payments to Wikileaks.
There is the real power in the world, credit card processors.
SPQR (26be8b) — 12/7/2010 @ 7:10 amAh, here it is. Visa Europe suspends payments to Wikileaks. Paypal already suspended and Mastercard is investigating as well.
SPQR (26be8b) — 12/7/2010 @ 7:12 amPatterico
Beat me to the punch. Btw, I found this article on the underlying charges to be troubling.
This sounds weird as hell. I mean one woman wrote an article on how to get legal revenge on a man who cheats. She claims he intentionally sabotaged a condom. no question it broke, but she claims he somehow sabotaged it. And the second girl’s complaint is that he didn’t wear a condom. But she still consented. So unprotected sex is a crime?
There are two possible explanations to all of this. the first is that the charges are weak but being built up because they want to get him on something. the second is that the report is leaving out really important details that would change how we see the charges. i’m not sure which it is.
Aaron Worthing (e7d72e) — 12/7/2010 @ 7:16 amSurprise sex. I am surprised that someone would want to have sex with Jillian.
JD (109425) — 12/7/2010 @ 7:17 amI believe the Swedish sex charges are bogus, but he is one creepy character. When I read about his Wikileaks cult followers, the names Jim Jones and David Kouresh pop up in my mind.
nk (db4a41) — 12/7/2010 @ 7:40 amI’ve thought for the longest time that Assange looks and talks like a villain in a James Bond movie.
Robert C. J. Parry (f27afb) — 12/7/2010 @ 7:44 amWell he looks like Colin Mochrie, from who’s line is it anyways, I see a lot of passive voice’ in that article as if Catlin was feeding it to a reporter
narciso (6075d0) — 12/7/2010 @ 7:52 amMr Parry wrote:
Christopher Walken as Max Zorin in A View to a Kill?
The 007 fan Dana (3e4784) — 12/7/2010 @ 10:56 amSeperated at birth?
Blue Ox (ff919a) — 12/7/2010 @ 11:03 amEasily the best Bond Villain. Not the best bond film (one of the worst, actually), but the best villain.
Walken and Assange both portray an imbalance in priorities that says ‘MENTALLY ILL’. Of course, Walken does it because it’s an hilarious act.
Assange could have been a hero here. Hard to believe, but there was a way that he could have played this that worked a lot better for everyone. Testifying about his findings. Very confined disclosure of what he found, etc.
Of course, the reason he got the intel in the first place was his pattern of using it to harm and embarrass us in a time of war, so perhaps I’m being unrealistic.
Dustin (b54cdc) — 12/7/2010 @ 11:04 amHe looks like Klaus Maria Brandauer in Never Say Never Again.
SPQR (26be8b) — 12/7/2010 @ 11:09 amAssange is nowhere near the stature of James Bond villains. He’s a creepy little Australian faggot who got hisself (sic) some even creepier computer geeks to follow him.
nk (db4a41) — 12/7/2010 @ 11:09 amnk’s right. Assange is a pathetic weasel. We should be thankful this enemy of our country has more in common with a coffee shop philosopher than Osama Bin Laden (a valid bond villain).
Might I add that not using protection when a woman wants you to is extremely pathetic and I don’t object to it being criminalized.
Dustin (b54cdc) — 12/7/2010 @ 11:20 amI think dropping the f@ggot bomb on him is a bit much. Actually a lot much. Assange reminds me of an albino Ichabod Crane.
JD (85b089) — 12/7/2010 @ 11:53 amTrue, but I don’t think the term has anything to do with homosexuality. Some kind of term meaning pathetic and silly and depraved, while being self absorbed and whiney. I guess we could just use the term ‘Assange’.
I guess I’m too invested in South Park (which argued that the f@g bomb has a different meaning than ‘I hate gays’).
The guy notes he got 1300 people killed, but that’s the price he is willing to pay for a damn website (and yet he hides his own private info).
Dustin (b54cdc) — 12/7/2010 @ 11:59 amWho cares about Assange? Wikileaks is more important than its founder. The powers that be will find some way to shut Assange up, if not this way then that way. While everyone obsesses over this guy who, for all his nuttiness sounds pretty libertarian, the same “powers that be” are quietly acting to close Wikileaks down and keep all us peasants from finding out how the corporate and political elites are running the show on this planet. It’s for our own protection right? So it’s all double plus good!
EdWood (c2268a) — 12/7/2010 @ 12:02 pmThen EdWood, why did Assange override other Wikileaks leaders in his data dumb of Afghanistan docs?
SPQR (26be8b) — 12/7/2010 @ 12:04 pmThis is actually a reasonable point, Ed.
And it’s Assange’s fault. There was a way to play this that would have done the world good, but that wasn’t what Assange wanted to do. He wanted to be a celebrity, and to hell with the enterprise of allowing legit whistleblowers to have a viable medium.
He’s a jackass. Then again, so are the idiots who trusted him with information, and I’m sure they wanted him to simply screw over the good guys in a time of war. I hope they all pay for what they’ve done.
Dustin (b54cdc) — 12/7/2010 @ 12:15 pmEasily the best Bond Villain.
Better than Goldfinger? No way, Jose.
Dmac (498ece) — 12/7/2010 @ 12:18 pmSo let’s see. A guy who has consensual unprotected sex is hunted for all over Europe with prosecutors falling all over themselves to extradite him anywhere there’s a judge willing to incarcerate him without bail.
Meanwhile, a convicted child-rapist, who drugged his 13-year old victim just prior to sodomizing her, gallivants all over Europe promoting his films, smugly assured that nobody would even consider extraditing him to the venue in which he committed his despicable crime.
Maybe someone can explain all this to me.
Steve (fe0872) — 12/7/2010 @ 1:56 pmHe aid that there had been death threats against his wife and family, so Iguess he is just a whoredog.
Hazy (996c34) — 12/7/2010 @ 1:58 pmsaid
Hazy (996c34) — 12/7/2010 @ 1:59 pmHe has a wife, and yet doesn’t use protection when he sleeps with a random girl he just met?
That’s sociopathic.
Dustin (b54cdc) — 12/7/2010 @ 2:01 pmAccording to Wikipedia, he has a son by a former girlfriend. Unprotected sex? The two Swedish girls wanted him tested for STD’s.
Hazy (996c34) — 12/7/2010 @ 2:21 pmHis barrister was going to fight deportation to Sweden on the grounds that they might extradite him to the US where some politicians had called for him to be executed.
Hazy (996c34) — 12/7/2010 @ 2:25 pmFiring squad at dawn comes to mind. It would slow down the leaks quite a bit.
Hazy (996c34) — 12/7/2010 @ 2:27 pmI hope he hired Polanski’s EU lawyers, and not his L.A. ones.
AD-RtR/OS! (b8ab92) — 12/7/2010 @ 2:42 pmWell, get Olbermann involved in opining on Assange and it only gets loonier.
SPQR (26be8b) — 12/7/2010 @ 3:41 pmCan I put in a vote for Kamal Khan? The man just plain had style.
Of course, there are always Mr Wint and Mr Kidd. 🙂
The very odd Dana (bd7e62) — 12/7/2010 @ 6:29 pmWhat’s an Australian bundle of sticks?
The curious Dana (bd7e62) — 12/7/2010 @ 6:31 pmLouis Jordan, certainly pulled off a suave villain,
narciso (6075d0) — 12/7/2010 @ 6:32 pmthen about Krabbe’s General Koskov, in the Living
Day Lights
Well, this post is already 35 hours old and the last comment came nearly a half day ago, but I just wanted to direct people to Victor Davis Hanson’s brutal take-down of Assange’s pretensions.
JVW (350d0b) — 12/8/2010 @ 11:44 amI hadn’t seen that. Thank you, JVW.
DRJ (d43dcd) — 12/8/2010 @ 12:17 pmDustin: as someone who has been called ‘faggot’ by random people shouting at me as they drove by in their car, while i was holding my then-boyfriend, now-husband’s hand *in public* … i think that ‘faggot’ often has something to do with homosexuality.
I would not have described Assange using that word.
aphrael (e0cdc9) — 12/8/2010 @ 1:33 pmOf course, you were all wondering. Could this story get weirder? Well, what the story needs are some anti-semites and some Holocaust denial and ofcourse some Jooos. And well, tada! They are here.
SPQR (26be8b) — 12/14/2010 @ 7:09 pm