© AP Photo / Frank Augstein
It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: "But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador's embassy in London."
That short sentence
includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would need to have been hiding under a rock for the past decade - or, amounting to much the same thing, been relying on the corporate media for your information about Assange, including from supposedly liberal outlets such as the
Guardian and the BBC.
At the weekend, a
Guardian editorial - the paper's official voice and probably the segment most scrutinised by senior staff - made just such a false claim:
Then there is the rape charge that Mr Assange faced in Sweden and which led him to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in the first place.
The fact that the
Guardian, supposedly the British media's chief defender of liberal values, can make this error-strewn statement after nearly a decade of Assange-related coverage is simply astounding. And that it can make such a statement days after the US finally
admitted that it wants to lock up Assange for 175 years on bogus "espionage" charges - a hand anyone who wasn't being wilfully blind always knew the US was preparing to play - is still more shocking.
Assange faces no charges in Sweden yet, let alone "rape charges". As former UK ambassador Craig Murray recently explained, the
Guardian has been misleading readers by
falsely claiming that an attempt by a Swedish prosecutor to extradite Assange - even though the move has not received the Swedish judiciary's approval - is the same as his arrest on rape charges. It isn't.
Also,
Assange did not seek sanctuary in the embassay to evade the Swedish investigation. No state in the world gives a non-citizen political asylum to avoid a rape trial. The asylum was granted on
political grounds. Ecuador rightly accepted Assange's concerns that the US would seek his extradition and lock him out of sight for the rest of his life.
Assange, of course, has been proven - yet again - decisively right by recent developments.
Comment: Judging by the big wins for nationalist parties in the UK, France, and Italy, any effect the contrived scandal had was regional and will likely not be very long lasting. As for who the likely plotters were, check out SOTT's analysis: NATO 'Deep State' And Israeli Interests Served by Ousting of Austrian Government
See also: Mossad was behind video leak that led to collapse of Austrian government - German Ex-Spy Chief