[masfuerte]

There is an important missing detail. The Swedes agreed to interview Assange about the rape allegations in London but the British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) put pressure on the Swedes not to. The CPS deleted the emails they sent to the Swedes and we only know of their existence because of a FOI request on the Swedish side. Why were the supposedly politically independent CPS so keen to get Assange extradited to Sweden? FWIW, the CPS was led at the time by Keir Starmer, current leader of the opposition.

[93po]

The entire "had sex with a broken condom" saga is ridiculous and built up to be an Assange smear campaign. Neither women went to the police to report a rape, they only wanted him to get tested for STDs, neither wanted charges pressed against Assange, and they both later retracted their stories.

If Assange did what was alleged, then that's awful and horrible and abusive and those women are victims. However the entirety of the reporting around this is wildly biased and dishonest and clearly manufactured to get him extradited, which worked.

[rejectfinite]

>and they both later retracted their stories

Did they? Just a few 2-3 years ago there was a documentary in Sweden and one of the women was interviewed extensivley.

[actionfromafar]

As long as we remember both things can be true at once.

[antisthenes]

And as long as we remember the likelihood/probability of things happening given the context.

[93po]

Yes

[seagullz]

The same machinery and MO that treacherously took down Jeremy Corbyn apparently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elp18OvnNV0

[pydry]

There was also the released GCHQ emails declaring it "an obvious fit up" because of the timing of the prosecution.

[foldr]

This is fairly meaningless. It’s just some random people at GHCQ saying that they think it looks like a fit up, on the basis of the same publicly available information that everyone else had at the time.

[DANmode]

> random people at GHCQ

[foldr]

Not sure what your point is. It’s clear from what’s quoted in the emails that some GHCQ employees are simply speculating based on the timing of the rape allegations. That’s something that a bunch of people outside GHCQ were also doing at the time.

The emails were handed over because they weren’t considered to be classified information. So it’s quite unlikely that they reveal discussions among people who had any inside knowledge about the Assange case.

> The records were revealed by Assange himself in a Sunday night interview with Spanish television programme Salvados in which he explained that an official request for information gave him access to instant messages that remained unclassified by GCHQ.

https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/20/julian-assange...

I don’t know anything about the internal workings of GCHQ, but one would hope that information is shared on a need to know basis. Assuming this to be the case, the vast majority of GHCQ employees would know no more about Assange than you or me.

[DANmode]

Your point (appears to be?) that GCHQ staff are on par with other Monday morning armchair quarterbacks; seems weak.

[_djo_]

Information inside agencies like GCHQ is strictly compartmentalised, with only the most senior staff having broad cross-programme understanding and access.

In fact, people can be even more cut off from information if they're at a low enough level inside an agency like that because they're forbidden from viewing leaked information to avoid jeopardising their clearances.

A GHCQ staffer working on, say, satellite signals intelligence for one of the regional desks is almost certainly not going to have any useful inside information on the case of someone like Assange.

[foldr]

It’s clearly the case in instances where they have the same information as everyone else.