Assange Is A Scumbag

[SteelCrysis]

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/22248...-no-victim
BTW, the person who wrote this is a Snowden fan, so you can't accuse him of being an NSA shill. And of course, Assange fanboys/governmentphobic conspiracy theorists are spouting conspiracy theory FUD in the comments.

I’ll admit it: I reacted as reflexively as anybody during those early days, when the air was on fire with the possibility that any moment could see a global conspiracy unveiled, or at least major government crime. The plot twist just seemed too convenient to be believed, and even the activist groups that usually make rape their central issue were skeptical; if only through omission and lack of investigation, the whole world collectively seemed to assume that Assange’s accusers were paid operatives of the US government. As time went on, however, this admittedly common-sense view of the situation came under fire from the facts.

Firstly, if the two women whose separate grievances have so dogged Assange were indeed government agents, then these agencies were displaying far better foresight than they ever have in the past. They would have had to get to two young women who we know, despite their anonymity, were passionately involved in the Wikileaks movement, and convince them both to essentially ruin their lives to support a government that is not their own, and which they actively oppose. These young agents were planted in Sweden, which doesn’t have the most helpful legal culture in the world, and told to fabricate odd and frankly awkward stories about mid-coital sexual discussions and broken condoms, rather than about more sensational violent assaults. This narrative seems no less far-fetched than the alternative, which is that everything is exactly as it seems.

The charges initially related to Assange’s continuing refusal to submit to DNA and STD tests — that’s how this all started. He doesn’t deny the encounters took place, but has denied that he ought to have to abide by the law that requires him to submit a sample as evidence. This is a man who is known to have serially impregnated women without, it would seem, any intention of sticking around to help deal with the resulting stresses. Documentarian Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets spends some time going over Assange’s love-em-and-leave-em history, openly considering whether he has some sort of pathological fatherhood complex. Pretty rough stuff — but perhaps not unwarranted, given his odd behavior. One of the accusers told the police she believed he had broken the condom intentionally.

Assange has decried the arrest warrant, unintentionally accessing the Men’s Rights movement by attacking the use of the sexual assault label. That may or may not be the right charge for what he did, but the fact is he refused to take the tests when asked informally by his accusers, prior to their going to the cops. These women were initially trying only to force him to take the tests; an arrest warrant was only issued after it was determined that there was no legal way to force him to without laying a criminal charge. Even if the actual charge of sexual assault is the wrong one, he was unquestionably involved in the situations these women describe.
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You may have noticed that I don’t like Julian Assange. Unlike Edward Snowden, who was measured and careful in what he leaked to the public, who took care to distinguish between genuine and superficial public benefit, who actually will be disappeared into a dark court if captured by the US, Assange is a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac with no regard for the delicacy of the issues he’s addressing. Assange was callous at the prospect of his leaks endangering US-allied Afghans left in the country after American troop withdrawals. He was dismissive of the possibility that his largely unfiltered releases of diplomatic cables could set back diplomatic relations and peace processes. He was, in short, exactly the kind of quasi-anarchist boogeyman the security establishment would have you believe every leaker and whistleblower to be.
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I don’t know if Assange will be extradited to the US from Sweden, but if he does end up in the US, that fact alone won’t invalidate the accusations against him, nor will it make his unthinking dismissal of those allegations any less self-serving and cowardly. Can accusations of sexual assault be used to bully men into silence, and smear their reputations? Of course. Would the security world use such accusations to achieve their own ends? Oh, of course. But Julian Assange is no such hero to the anti-surveillance movement, nor the information freedom movement. Rather, he’s a man with a long history of fleeing his personal, ethical, and legal obligations.

Assange simply is not the paragon we all wanted him to be. He does not deserve our support, unquestioning or otherwise. There are plenty of heroes in this war — so let’s focus on them, and leave this self-made martyr to rot in the prison he built with his own hands, and words, and deeds.