[ivarb]

The diplomatic cables were released November 28 2010. The international arrest warrant November 18 2010. Before that other documents had been released, during the course of almost a year. So, the way I see it there is nothing really special about the timeline here. It is interesting that a lot of people seem to think that he should not be held responsible (or at least investigated) for the crimes he might have committed against the women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...

[btilly]

The wrong event may have been cited, but the timeline was special. As https://www.npr.org/2019/04/11/712306713/12-years-of-disrupt... verifies, here is the order of events.

April, a famous video was released from inside a chopper that was mistakenly shooting journalists. May, Chelsea Manning was arrested for that. July, 75,000 documents were released about the Afghan war. August, the rape charges are filed. October, 400,000 documents about the Iraq war. November, the cable leak.

So the cable leaks did not come first. However there was lots of other stuff already released that could have motivated the US here.

And it is also quite possible that concern over the cable leaks was the motivation. You see, the US knew about everything that Chelsea Manning had already released, and had reason to believe that Wikileaks had it all and was releasing things in stages for maximum damage. (It turns out that a drip drip of bad news has much greater emotional impact on people than a single torrent.) Therefore they had the motivation to find ways to put pressure on Assange to NOT leak what he had. And what they did, didn't work.

Moving on, please check your assumptions about whether he should be held responsible. It is my belief that he is an example of selective enforcement of laws that should be more broadly enforced. Therefore my belief that he was targeted for other reasons is not in conflict with my belief that he should have been targeted. I just think that it is wrong that it takes a guy embarrassing a major military for the police to take a woman's complaints seriously.

[ivarb]

"Moving on, please check your assumptions about whether he should be held responsible. It is my belief that he is an example of selective enforcement of laws that should be more broadly enforced. " Okay... I live in Sweden and my view is not that he is a victim of selective enforcement. All rape allegations reported to the police are investigated in Sweden as far as I know. Unfortunately it is usually hard to find supporting evidence and it is usually word against word, which often is not enough for conviction. That his case was open for so long, and that the prosecutor found a reason to reopen the case (on request of the victim) does indicate that there might be substantial evidence.

[SXX]

Wikileaks is not just Assange. Obviously there far more people were working in background to verify everything they can and make sure their data is legit before they show it to the public. Do you really think there was way for them to keep upcoming release like actually secret from US government?

[ivarb]

Sure. They probably had an idea of what was going on. Don't really see why that is important though. What I was replying to stated "The charge and extradition request was made shortly after the release of the US diplomatic cables." which is incorrect. There is not anything suspicious about the timeline as I see it, the arrest warrant was issued after Assange left Sweden during an open investigation, which he was quite aware of. The only thing that would have been strange is if an arrest warrant hadn't been issued.

[bdamm]

We're discussing this now, using materials available now, and discussing a historical event that differs by two weeks. It could have been that the time stamp on the warrant was backdated two weeks.

[notahacker]

Except that it was widely reported by mainstream media on 18th November, as the culmination of a long, drawn out and widely reported appeal process dating back to earlier in the year. It really is astonishing how creative people can get with the well-established facts in order to make their conspiracy theories have legs...

Ockham's razor says if there's any connection at all between the two dates, it's Assange ordering Wikileaks to release the files as soon as possible after the arrest warrant was issued to get himself more sympathetic news coverage.