Let's start with Naomi Brockwell.
A new one, only a few weeks old, and factually accurate. Some of the dicier bits are somewhat simplified to keep things moving, but it's accurate.
The ‘age-restricted’ on the second better copy is bullshit. They just want to restrict viewership. Yes there are short clips of the ‘Collateral Murder’ video.
Democracy When?
This clip from Amy stages an ambush towards the end with a particularly unsavoury character - someone, it turns out, she's rather acquainted with. But the first part's good.
Delve Back
But if we're going to really delve back into history, then let's just do it. This is back when everything around us went on hold because big things were going down in the world around.
This is the Four Corners documentary on Assange, with a heavy focus on that once-great country known as Sweden.
A Few Notes
A few notes, if you can indulge us. (We published over 1,350 pieces on the case at the time, even printed a book about it. Find more info below.)
Julian departed Sweden on 27 September 2010, but not for London. He flew the Lufthansa commuter to Berlin. London came later after he'd met three journalists in the German capital.
The 'Brotherhood' mentioned is actually a rather fanatical religious adjunct to the social democratic party. Their chairman Peter Weiderud acted the CIA asset. Later intermezzos shed more light on the matter.
Crayfish parties are futile. A once-famous British corporate consultant came to the archipelago in time for a crayfish party and asked 'when do you serve the food?' You suck at claws. You have a toaster. You take plain toast and slap cheese on it. That's it. Oh - you also drink a lot of vodka.
Ardin's crayfish party (the footage supposedly shows the courtyard for her block of flats) had lots of freaked-out radical lesbians attending. (They were mostly Ardin's friends, so...) The most memorable incident was when one of them, a secretary emboff in Turkey, stood up, got everyone's attention, and declared: 'OK, nothing to do about this now, but next year's party: no men - agreed?' This is also when Ardin tells best friend Kajsa: 'I fucked him last night, it wasn't great, but I can fix you up now if you want to fuck him yourself tonight'. (Think about that one. Why offer to arrange a bonk for someone if it’s a bad bonk? Ardin was infamous on Gotland for being a ‘trophy hunter’ - to her, getting Assange ‘in’ was a trophy her best friend would surely appreciate.)
Claes Borgström is (was) one of the most corrupt people in Sweden, an infamous drunkard often seen stumbling about the capital in a stupor.
Rick Falkvinge is actually DICK GREGER AUGUSTSSON, a former project manager for Microsoft who tired every morning of hearing 'good morning, DICK' and so legally changed his name. The 'e' on Falkvinge is not silent. 'Falkvinge' means 'falcon wing'.
'Wilén' is pronounced 'Vilén' (‘vee-LANE‘). V and W are interchangeable. Vowels preceded by single consonants are always long.
How Ardin turned Wilén into a useful idiot is another story. See below.
Borgström’s bullshit about Julian’s return or non-return: remember, Borgström was very corrupt. That’s why Ardin chose him. What really happened is Julian waited and waited and finally had his lawyer Björn Hurtig contact the Gothenburg midget to find out ‘wassup’ and, when she said ‘nothing up’, get her permission to leave the country and go about his business. Ny evidently changed her mind on 25 September or thereabouts but Hurtig couldn’t reach Assange, who commuted to Berlin in good faith. But, contrary to her solemn promises, Ny planned on nicking Julian on his return. The only thing wrong with that super-smart plan was that she couldn’t interrogate him without his lawyer, so she had to contact Hurtig beforehand and ask him to stay in his office a few hours longer that evening. Hurtig, not as dumb as Ny, immediately understood what was up and contacted Julian to warn him. Julian then cancelled his flight back.
At the end you have a grand proclamation by a US ambassador.
'We are not planning to prosecute Julian Assange.'
Yeah sure, bro. We’ll frame it, OK?
TED
An absolute classic. The interviewer is none other than the founder of TED.
Kristinn Hrafnsson and photographer Inge Ingesson went to Baghdad.
Julian has an itchy nose or... ?
Oslo Freedom Forum May 2010
Another classic.
What Really Happened
Perhaps no one will ever know what really happened in August 2010 - not even Julian - but this is our best guess, based on what we know about local culture and mores and on detecting the nuances in the documents and the testimony.
We believe Julian was stitched up. By someone in Sweden working for Uncle Sam. There's no other explanation for all the weird things going on.
But to understand what happened those August days doesn't require ConspIrAcy theories.
We do not know but we believe Julian's contacts with Sweden, for whatever reason, were initially through Peter Weiderud. How Julian came into contact with that 'Brotherhood' we do not know. Peter immediately turned over all responsibility to his staffer Ardin. Ardin has a bit of a shady past with Cuba.
But Ardin decides she'll be out of town all that week, and so she in turn delegates responsibility to a photographer friend of hers who has to be one of the thickest people in existence. Ardin is not returning until Saturday, when she’ll help coordinate Julian's talk at the LO-borgen in downtown Stockholm. Exactly what was so pressing that she had to leave right then: it's not known. And perhaps not even plausible.
But what she did was ambush him by returning a day early. Works nicely. A one-room flat, 25 square meters (225 square feet?) with very little furniture, only a nice welcoming bed. Oh what do we do now, Julian? For I am here, darling. It's early evening, where will you go? Oh let's go grab a bite to eat and talk about it. Would you like another glass of wine, darling? And so forth.
(And when he fell asleep, Ardin took a photo and posted it to Facebook so all the three-letter agencies in the world could know where he was.)
And then bonkity-bonkity-bonk-bonk, perhaps neither are particularly agile in bed, Ardin is running a private nightclub for lesbians on Gotland so what's she doing anyway? And Julian's twice her size and what does he know about Swedish girls aside from the I Am Curious movies? But they somehow make it through to morning. Now it's off to the LO-borgen.
Sofia's there. How did she get a ticket? 'PRIO PRESS', said Ardin's tweet before the event was completely booked, at least a week before Sofia heard about it.
And why the sudden interest, Sofia? Oh I read about him in the papers the other day, she said. Sofia was otherwise best known (if at all known) for being a Lou Reed groupie and very likely the world's worst-ever photographer. But Sofia also had this phobia thing about microbes. Her boyfriend Seth said so. (And where was Seth now?)
'How Does It Taste?'
When others in the group see Peter with Sofia, someone they'd never seen before, and approach him to ask, as they might all go to lunch later and they don't want strangers around, Peter says curtly: 'SHE'S WITH ME'. OK, dude, sorry we asked.
At lunch that afternoon, Sofia is dragged along by Peter, but, all through the lunch, says nothing. And she's sitting right next to Julian. Not a word - until he tries a piece of knäckebröd with cheese on it. About the most tasteless thing going. It's now Sofia opens her mouth to ask 'how does it taste?'
Julian's still staying with Ardin. One person offers his own flat, as it's 35 square metres - slightly bigger - but Ardin says no. 'He's staying with me.' Rick Falkvinge attends this horrific party. The plan's been for Julian to now stay with Rick in Sollentuna, and the following day they're going to do a presser and announce their colo agreement. But Ardin doesn't want Julian going away at all. Julian stays with her, she tells them.
Julian's working on Monday at Zinkensdamm with his Stockholm liaison. Sofia contacts him in the day. He tells her where he's going to be. She works on the other side of town, at a museum not far from the university. She cuts after work back through town to Zinkensdamm and waits outside for him to appear. Long wait.
She takes him down to the wharf. They sit at the waterfront a while. She suggests getting a hotel room. Copulation’s the name of the game, but hotel room’s not the thing to do for someone who's the target of an international dragnet.
No, I like to see girls in their natural habitat, says Julian. Oh well. So it’ll be back to her place in Enköping. Short commuter train ride.
What Sofia doesn't understand - actually there are many things of course - is that Julian is dog-tired and he's going to crash the moment he gets inside her door. The guy is seriously sleep-deprived. (See our piece on the Leberkäse Kid for a clue.)
Another thing she doesn't understand is the man is always busy - he's trying to topple things like the Deep State, Obama's put out an order that everyone should immediately pick him up and worry about justification later, just get the fucker off the streets and out of commission.
He's just released the Afghan War Diaries, the biggest dump in world history, and he's all over IceRocket cos shit is breaking fast all the time... And Sofia is pissed, she tells her friends, because he doesn't pay enough attention to her.
Another thing is that Julian almost never notices girls. Oh he ends up in bed with them all the time, but that's because they're always working on him, they all want to bang Mr WikiLeaks. The only time Julian notices a girl is when she's got something interesting to say. And Sofia's got none of that. What did Ardin say about it? 'What she lacks in the brains department she can perhaps compensate for in the boobs department.'
Julian somehow gets a bit of sleep, then he and Sofia start a fuckathon. 4-5-6 times that night. Takes a while to get going when you're rusty. Sofia goes out to buy breakfast nosh at about 08:00 - hello? She had nothing at all at home? And then - lo and behold - her brother - who lives all the way across town - turns up right downstairs? Oh yeah sure. Hey bro I got that WikiLeaks guy under the sheets, you wanna come up and see him? (Bro declines.)
Julian's supposed to get into town (Stockholm) as he's sealing a deal with the head of another tabloid for a biweekly column. (Nice!) And he does. The photo should still be online. It is.
He says goodbye to Sofia and takes the train back to Stockholm.
Sofia doesn't hear from Julian right away. (And where's her own boyfriend?) So she finally calls Ardin (whom she does not know) and you can imagine the conversation.
'Hi, I'm Sofia, the blonde right below you on Saturday, I had this single-lens reflex camera, batting my eyelashes at him all the time, we made out in the park where I work, I'm the cashmere pullover with the bouncy boobs, Julian spent the night with me a couple of days ago, oh he is so dreamy, we must have done it half a dozen times, I lost count haha, we're going to name our baby Afghanistan...'
Ardin wasn't necessarily head over heels with Julian. She's a trophy-hunter. She's wily. But now she just had her own trophy stolen away. And she knows the 7 Steps to Revenge.
Ardin functioned at her university as the liaison between the police and her comparably gender-weird friends who existed in all-in complete Man-Hate-Mode™ and practiced lawfare on anyone they could.
Ardin knew the law. Ardin knew that sexual molestation is a misdemeanour, and misdemeanours are registered as crimes against the victim. Rape, on the other hand, is a crime against the state (allmänt åtal). All Ardin has to do is get Sofia to a police station and formalities will take care of the rest. Ardin’s name remains hidden.
The preposterous pretext Ardin gives Sofia: yes it's preposterous. But Sofia can't see through it, and Ardin can slip back into the shadows. And if the shit does hit the fan, then it'll hit Sofia, not her. Or so Ardin thinks.
7 Steps to Revenge
Remember that Ardin published the list '7 Steps to Revenge' - how Ardin could ‘legally’ harass the men she hates. She'd just been dumped, she said, so she started plotting for revenge. Now Julian - her trophy Julian - had just gone off and bonked another girl who looks good in pink cashmere. Just get her into the police station. Sofia darling? Perhaps you should go to the police and ask, if you're so afraid of STDs. My friend Irmeli works at the police station by the train station downtown. I'll go with you. We'll just ask if they can find Julian and get him to take a test…
(Why can't she take one herself? Note: no worries about being pregnant.)
Great idea! But here's the thing: if Sofia tells her story - and, remember, all she wants to do, all she thinks she's doing - is getting this someone who's notoriously hard to reach by phone to take an STD test...
But Ardin knows that, in Sweden, as Scott Adams described it, almost anything can be rape. And Ardin's buddy Irmeli will be there too, as Irmeli works for the police at that station... All we gotta do is get cashmere boobs through the door. And Sweden will take care of the rest.
'I sort of experienced the same thing', Ardin tells the police, thereby making the biggest blooper of her life.
Now Ardin will quietly slip away, into the night, claiming she has to go to a party with her friend Kajsa, but probably takes time along the way to ring her friend Niklas at the tabloid. Ardin’s revenge worked. Or so she thinks.
Harpsund
But Niklas isn't in. Niklas is off to the summer residence of the PM who's having his annual crayfish party. Niklas is the country's by-far highest paid reporter. He always gets the cushy jobs. Tonight all he's got to do is sit there with photographer Stefan Söderström who'll take photos of all the piggies in their starched white shirts... And Niklas will get a few meaningless quotes to fill out a few pages, and it'll be good for the tabloid.
So Ardin talks with Diamant. That's his name. Diamant Salihu. That doesn't sound Swedish cos it's not. Diamant's a bloody immigrant. Oh they gotta treat foreigners better nowadays, but if a nice assignment like drinking bubbly and vodka and hanging out with fancy people comes along, Diamant’ll stay in the newsroom and Niklas will get the gig.
So the phone rings and Diamant picks it up and he hears the police are about to book Julian Assange for rape. Whoah! Can it be true? Diamant rings up the city's on-duty prosecutor Maria Häljebo Kjellstrand - who's not supposed to say a goddamned thing. Except she does. (Her husband works for the ministry for foreign affairs - now's when you start to realise there are a lot of things going on.) MHK confirms for Diamant.
Diamant now has a story. And it's a big one! The office goes nuts. Oh we gotta do this one up good and proper! He's gonna be arrested in town, that Julian Asserge! They'll put him in handcuffs. We gotta get a picture! An exclusive!
So they ring Stefan Söderström. The photographer. Not their ace reporter. They ring their free-lance photographer.
But Niklas is sitting right there with Stefan Söderström, he sees the message, and he knows immediately what he has to do.
123 Kilometres
The distance by car from Harpsund to Stockholm is 123 kilometres. Niklas probably drove that in 50 minutes tops. He needs to muscle in on that story, push that immigrant kid out of the way, and make it his own. (He later owns up to this and apologises in a media rag.)
So by 05:00 on Saturday morning 21 August they're ready to roll (although there are indications they'd first planned on publishing at midnight). Three of their employees - Diamant on the tabloid’s official account, Emanuel Karlsten on his own account, and Niklas on his own account- start tweeting like mad and keep it up until nearly noon, waiting for someone, anyone, to pick up the story they later acknowledge was the biggest scoop in their sordid history.
The higher-ups in Sweden are going batshit. They do not want this scandal. (More intimations that several SIGs are in play.) They want, at all costs, to stop this from embarrassing Sweden. So they contact what's known as the prosecutor-general. His name is Anders Perklev. Get somebody good on it, Anders, goddammit, and make it go away.
And who's the best of the best?
Eva Finné
Eva Finné’s at her summer cottage for the weekend. A little extra work here, Eva. They have a messenger send all the documents out to her. Eva's finished by late afternoon and makes two announcements, at 16:48 and 16:52.
Ardin knows nothing about this. Last night, after she'd gone off to perhaps party with Kajsa, and most likely ring the tabloid and talk to Diamant - her 7 steps to revenge, remember - somebody comes down to Irmeli who was now taking in the Sofia testimony and tells them that Julian Assange is now under arrest in absentia for rape and the police are going to hunt the bastard down.
Goes to Pieces
Sofia goes to pieces. She finally understands what they've done. She thought the police were going to help her locate Julian so they could ask him to please take an STD test. But this? This? Rape? (Remember: they'd done it something like 4-5-6 times that one night, she wasn't exactly indifferent to him.) Sofia starts getting hysterical, wants nothing more to do with Irmeli or the police, accuses Ardin and the police of railroading her.
Irmeli asks her to please sign off on what they've so far completed, but Sofia refuses and storms out in a state, muttering about how Julian’s going to be so angry with her for creating this mess.
Back to Saturday. Ardin's initial plan of revenge was to use Sofia as a useful idiot and then get the F out of Dodge - of course keeping her own perky nose clean.
Right before noon, Ardin's phone rings. It's the police. You said you had a similar experience, can you tell us about that? Oh sure, says Ardin, who pulls out her Bullshit Lexicon.
Ardin never said she saw anything. She said only that she *heard* something like the popping of a balloon. There was something wrong with the condom I grabbed out of my night table and gave him.
And of course she took him to LO-borgen the next morning, then had lunch with him, then organised a crayfish party with lots of politically correct man-hating Swedish lesbians, then refused to let Julian go with Rick Falkvinge as planned, even snubbed another offering to put Julian up with 'he's with me'.
And then Sofia enters the picture. On Tuesday or so. Ardin starts to boil. Her 7 steps to revenge. Now she’s taken the useful idiot to the police so they can fuck him over real good. And now she’s got the police on the horn.
The entire Ardin interrogation that day is in two parts that straddle lunch. At the end, the police ask Ardin if she’s still got that condom lying around.
Oh yeah sure, she tells them. I hang them on my mantelpiece, like Xmas stockings. A condom lying about eight days after the fact?
No, seriously: Ardin tells them ‘I’ll check’. And the police tell her they’ll pop over later to pick it up.
Mats & Eva
One would like to assume Ardin turned on a radio at some point. After all, shit be going down in a majorly way.
But Ardin has to work fast, has to be ready before the police arrive. So she takes a new condom out of her night table, and tries to rip it so it matches the story she gave the police.
She succeeds. The police knock on her door and take away the condom. But the radio’s on too. Ardin can hear how Eva Finné’s closed the ‘rape’ part of the police investigation into Julian Assange.
But that leaves Ardin wide open. Alone. Exposed.
The exact opposite of what she’d planned.
Jävlar.
Borgström & Ny
Ardin contacts Borgström in desperation - who else?
Borgström knows this rabid man-hater Marianne Ny on the west coast who’s supposed to work on cases of ‘domestic violence’. Although other countries in the north of Europe have successfully eradicated domestic violence, Sweden has not. Because the method used makes both parties accept responsibility. (60% of all domestic violence incidents in Sweden are instigated by women.)
But Sweden’s wacko feminists will have none of that. Responsibility for domestic violence falls solely on the man. Even though the woman is more often than not the instigator. Because all men are animals. And to call a man an animal is an insult to animals. And yes they really say so officially.
And it’s in that spirit that Borgström’s friend Marianne Ny wants to rewrite and revise some of the legislation in the country. Borgström’s ready to help.
Ardin needs Borgström to get the rape case reopened. To shield her. Borgström applies to be appointed legal counsel for both Ardin and Sofia, although Sofia’s part of the investigation is closed.
‘As if he were a real man’
Before Borgström is formally appointed, he goes to Mats who runs the police station and asks to be let into their super-secure computerised case system (Datoriserad utredningsrutin med Tvångsmedelshantering, DurTvå for short).
Those systems are built to be secure. Mats gives Borgström access. What is Borgström going to do? Something he’s infamous for doing. Gussying up the testimony of witnesses to trigger the unwitting prosecutors.
At one point, Borgström comes upon a section where Sofia describes how she and Julian started getting ‘serious’. Kissing and hugging and fondling and that kind of stuff, and then Julian pushes Sofia back onto the mattress. Borgström changes this to:
‘He pushed her back onto the mattress as if he were a real man.’
(Yes, it’s totally true. The sleuths at Sweden’s Flashback forum worked it out.)
And so forth. Borgström kept working on Sofia’s testimony until he had it just right so it’d push all the new prosecutor Marianne Ny’s buttons.
But there was still one obstacle. DurTvå.
You can’t overwrite documents in DurTvå. Once they’re submitted, they stay. And the date can’t be edited either. The date of Sofia’s testimony is 20 August. Now it’s almost September. Ardin’s friend Irmeli is in charge of resubmitting. She contacts her boss Mats.
‘This doesn’t work!’ she tells him. ‘This is going to have the dates all wrong!’
‘Submit it anyway’, her boss barks back.
Mats has done one more thing. He’s the one who was given Ardin’s funky condom. The idea was to send it off to the country’s forensic lab to see what they could find. In terms of how it was damaged etc. The idea specifically was not to do anything else. But Mats asked them to do something else.
DNA analysis.
Two Types
There are two types of DNA. Genomic and mitochondrial. The former is what uniquely identifies us. The latter can’t identify us, is found in hair follicles and fingernails and things of that nature.
Several people who do lab work tried this and reported to Flashback. To be sure ‘in practice’ matched ‘in theory’. For it should be literally impossible to remove genomic DNA from a condom.
So they tried. Got together with their partners, chose to use a condom just this once, bonked away - then tried every trick in the book to get the DNA off the buggers. Nothing worked.
They tried solvents, and microwaves, and ultraviolet light - they tried everything. And these were lab guys and girls, so they knew what they were doing. Nothing helped.
A condom actually used for sex by a man and a woman - PIV or ‘penis in vagina’ sex - is going to be drenched in DNA both inside and out - from both the man and the woman.
The condom Ardin gave to the police had no genomic DNA whatsoever.
All it had was mitochondrial DNA - the kind found in fingernails.
Anyway
Anyway. That’s how we see it. No one foresaw this. When we published Twelve Hours That Shook the World, we thought it was all over. But it had barely begun. Quote the foregoing title when writing for a special thanks.
Free Book
The book is our translation of the Swedish police protocols, including notes and pieces for context. Rather than purchasing from Amazon, write to us and you'll be sent a free PDF copy.
Our translation’s the one used by the British courts.
Next time we'll be back in business again, hopefully with a piece on Unix and Unix file management that's been gathering dust for a while.