Julian Assange furore deepens as new details emerge of sex crime allegations
Bitter divisions open up between supporters and critics of WikiLeaks leader in wake of fresh claims by Swedish women
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The Bizarre Swedish law....
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The Bizarre Swedish law....
As fresh snow erases the traces of Friday's scrum of camera crews from the elegant lawns of a Georgian mansion in rural East Anglia, inside Ellingham Hall Julian Assange is considering his next move.
Transformed from cyber celebrity into household name, Assange – the man who kicked a diplomatic hornet's nest across the globe – is carrying an extraordinary weight of controversy and opprobrium on his narrow shoulders.
He faces a whole new debate this weekend over his personal conduct, after the full allegations made by two women in Sweden, who accuse him of sexual misconduct and rape, were published in the Guardian today. It is their accounts that led Stockholm authorities to request the extradition of Assange, so that he can be questioned. This in turn led to him spending nine days on remand in Wandsworth prison – a controversial decision by the courts.
The decision was overturned on appeal yesterday, when he was allowed out on bail. This was agreed on the condition that he remain at Ellingham Hall, the home of Vaughan Smith, one of his wealthy supporters who is a former journalist and member of the Coldstream Guards. Smith said that he had offered his home as "an act of principle".
Dismissed by Assange's supporters as a smear campaign, the sex crime case now threatens to move from sideshow to overwhelm the main event – the work he has done in his public life.
In part, Assange, 39, has become a figurehead for whistleblowers, but he can blame this on supporters who have pressed their accolades on the man, rather than the cause.
Today, one of America's most famous porn barons, Larry Flynt of Hustler magazine, said that he had given $50,000 (£32,000) to the Assange defence fund, calling him a "hero" and saying that he deserved a "ticker-tape parade". Flynt's support was not for WikiLeaks, but because he thought the rape charges were a nonsense.
Assange has been called "the new Jason Bourne" by Jemima Khan, the "Ned Kelly of the Cyber Age" by many in the press in his native Australia and a libertine 007 by those who note his fondness for martinis.
On the other side, Republican US senators have lined up behind secretary of state Hillary Clinton to condemn him. Sarah Palin claims that he is "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" that America should pursue "with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders". The New Yorker's George Packer called Assange "megalomaniacal" and Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens called him "a middle man and peddler who resents the civilisation that nurtured him".
There have been disturbing calls from both Republicans and Democrats for Assange to be assassinated.
It is now nearly three weeks since he and his WikiLeaks team began disseminating secret US state department cables to internet users and newspaper readers around the world who were in turns fascinated and appalled.
The cables have revealed wrong-doing, international double-dealing, espionage, plots, bitchiness, bad behaviour and scandal in the political, military and business worlds. Within a torrent of 250,000 documents was information that showed how world leaders lied and connived on everything from the direction of the conflict in Afghanistan, to spying at the UN and the Saudis putting pressure on the US to bomb Iran.
The WikiLeaks campaign of reveal and be damned has polarised opinion and divided both left and right. The US government was furious, and is expected to take legal action. Already pressure may have been exerted, as large financial companies including PayPal and Visa – and today the Bank of America – have refused to do business with WikiLeaks, cutting it from donors.
After Assange's period in jail last week however, the focus has switched. "It is unusual for a sex-offence case to be presented outside of the judicial process in such a manner, but then it is unheard of for a defendant, his legal team and supporters to so vehemently and publicly attack women at the heart of a rape case," read the Guardian's editorial today as it explained why it had chosen to publish the allegations in detail.
The paper is reflecting a growing discomfort among many at the widespread vilification – and naming – of the two alleged victims on websites and blogs, and also of one of Assange's lawyers, Mark Stephens, referral to the sex offence charges as a "honeytrap" .
"I have never heard the like: legal representatives do not and should not stand on the steps outside a court of law and make such comments about their clients. It is neither right nor fitting," said one outraged barrister. "It is certainly in my view deeply unprofessional."
Human rights campaigner Bianca Jagger has directed her Twitter followers to a blog suggesting that one of the women had links to an anti-Castro Cuban group. Michael Moore, the American film-maker, has claimed that Sweden does not usually pursue rape allegations.
Others have suggested that Assange may have fallen foul to a pact between jealous female groupies. A range of deeply misogynistic blog posts have blamed "feminists", despite insistence from people close to Assange that there is no great conspiracy.
A new campaign called "talkaboutit" has been started by Swedish women to defend the accusers, but many young activists in the UK see a conspiracy, with the power of the US at its heart.
Jim Cranshaw, 29, an anti-cuts campaigner and member of the UK Uncut movement, said that a commonly held view among young activists was that the allegations against Assange were a witchhunt by the US. "The majority of my peers are deeply sceptical about the whole process. He is wanted by the most powerful country in the world, and the timing of the allegations, the extradition attempts, it all seems too convenient".
Cranshaw said that the CIA had a history of directing sex offence allegations against its enemies, and that there was a feeling among activists that Assange might be the latest victim. "The CIA has used sex offence allegations in the past, because it makes people dislike you even if you win the case, as with Castro.
"There seems to be a lot of political pressure to get him to America and to possibly kill him." It is a view shared by some members of Anonymous, a group of hackers, that have launched cyber attacks against companies that have withdrawn their support from WikiLeaks. Most members have chosen to ignore the content of the sexual allegations. The writer Joan Smith told the Observer that there was a disturbing "Polanski" effect going on among people who didn't know Assange personally, but were so enthralled by what he had done that they were not prepared to accept that he might be flawed.
"It's like Julian and the WikiLeaks – a new boy band. It's turned into a phenomenon of celebrity. But people who assert the innocence of a man they have never met are on dangerous ground. It's that rush to judgment which is so extraordinary. Sexual manners and sexual conduct come in for careful consideration in Sweden and on the whole I rather approve of that."
Others have shown similar reservations. WikiLeaks supporter, historian and film-maker Tariq Ali said that it was possible to separate Assange, the man, and the allegations from the cables.
"WikiLeaks is an organisation and he [Julian] is one of them. So I am very glad he is out and all that, but WikiLeaks would go on even without him, and that is important to stress."
The investigative journalist John Pilger argues that Assange must be defended, "because he is an innocent man until proven otherwise".
"In Sweden, the presumption of innocence has been publicly torn up by those whose duty was to safeguard it. This has encouraged a vicious campaign in the US, including incitement to murder Assange, and secret planning to stitch him up as some sort of terrorist.
"With the enemies Julian Assange faces, it's impossible to separate his public and private lives. The threat is clear: that he will be extradited to the US where the administration is trying to invent a specious law by which to prosecute him and put him away for the rest of his life.
"That is a set-up worthy of a totalitarian state, [and] tells us how far the US has travelled from its first amendment and its democracy. The events in Sweden feed into this. Right from the beginning, there has been a public smear on Julian Assange. This is not to say it is a 'CIA conspiracy'; but it has been a studied smear with many beneficiaries."
Pilger's view is rejected in Sweden, where a counter campaign is now building steam. Journalists, hackers and left-leaning activists do not see the hand of the US in the assault allegations.
The case is now in the hands of a fresh prosecutor, Marianne Nye, a specialist in sex crime. She must decide whether there is evidence for the case to stand up in court, and wants to question Assange.
A senior civil servant, who asked not to be named, also dismissed allegations of a plot, arguing that Swedish culture is often misunderstood. "Swedes are capable of seeing the advantages of WikiLeaks, in terms of the debate it has sparked about freedom of expression, while conceding that Assange may have unsavoury morals between the sheets.''
But he conceded that prosecution authorities had been clumsy. "The fact that one prosecutor dismissed the charges against Assange, and another picked them up afterwards, makes the case look fishy. The prosecuting authorities should have acted more expeditiously and speedily.'' Indeed conspiracy theories are largely dismissed by Swedes outside the cyber community, who saw their government show no particular interest in WikiLeaks despite the site's massive servers being based there. Swedish politicians have no special alliance with the US. They were staunchly anti-Iraq war, and rebuked the US ambassador to Sweden strongly when a rendition plane landed in the capital.
Åsa Linderborg, the culture editor of the leftwing Aftonbladet tabloid newspaper, said: "The Americans are very lucky indeed that Assange screwed around in Sweden, a society which takes rape allegations very seriously.''
