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Comment by einarfd | Hacker News Reader

To a lot of people Assange is a hero, and I'll grant that I liked a lot of the early actions of Wikileak under him.

But to me, he is first and foremost someone that ran from a sexual assault investigation and has spent the years since that trying to evade justice. I have no regard left for the man after doing that.

Some will argue that he would not have gotten a fair hearing in Sweden, and that they would have extradite him to the USA. My impression of the Swedish legal system, does not line up with that. So I have to respectfully disagree with those that think that.

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Then again, to his credit, he eventually met his Swedish prosecutors from the safety of the embassy (and released the gory details a month later [1]). And there were genuine concerns from the get go that he'd get booted across the Atlantic had he stepped out of the embassy.

I've honestly no idea how warranted the rape claims in Sweden were - and to be clear, I'd tend to side with the women who filed them - but you can't just dismiss the whole thing on grounds he was escaping those charges.

In a similar situation I can't imagine anyone except the most naive idealist would have risked the wrath of US.gov (whose budget, remember, is on the order of magnitude of Germany's GDP) over miscellanea in Sweden (however important to the victims) that had 'excuse for extradition to the US' written all over it.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/07/julian-assange...

Sweden has a long history of being a neutral country, it spent the whole of the cold war as that, and is still not a member of NATO. They did departure that doctrine somewhat when they joined the European Union. But it is still very much alive.

Extraditing Assange to the USA over a political charge would have been a huge departure of the neutrality doctrine, I have a hard time seeing how any Swedish government would have survived doing something so blatantly un Swedish.

The UK on the other hand, is a country that boost it has a special relationship with the USA, and is imo. the European country most likely to extradite him. So it fairly weird he went there, if not getting extradited to the USA was the goal.

Swedish Cold War neutrality was a sham. They aligned their tactics and weapons acquisitions with NATO standards. From the 1950s onwards they secretly collaborated with the UK and USA on intelligence and defensive plans.

There really was no question that they were in the NATO sphere except for formality.

Finland was more truly neutral.

> Then again, to his credit, he eventually met his Swedish prosecutors from the safety of the embassy

I'm not sure he deserves credit for this. He met with them in an effort to appease them and hopefully get them to lay off. The risk of him meeting them in the embassy was low to none, right?

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