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Lawyers for Julian Assange are outraged that The Guardian has published leaked Swedish police files about the rape charges faced by the WikiLeaks chief.
The Assange legal team says that the documents are “trying to make Julian look bad.” Call him old fashioned, but this reporter remembers fondly a time when rape charge sheets made the alleged perpetrator look like a top bloke.
Mr Assange is also concerned that sensitive information about his transfer from a brutal prison to a plush country mansion was leaked to a journalist writing for Les Misérables.
The Guardian is hopeful that the furious Mr Assange will be mollified with a haughty lecture about the public’s right to know and maybe some of that crap about a new age of “scientific journalism”.
But for Mr Assange’s critics, the documents prove that in 2009 he overstated the case for going into two Swedish women.
The Australian quoted one observer as saying that Mr Assange had been “hoist by his own petard.” In a further irony, it was Mr Assange who first revealed secret petard sales to Denmark in 1601.
On 7 December, Mr Assange wrote in The Australian praising the leaking of sensitive documents about other people. In his view, seeing secret documents helps readers to judge for themselves. Swedish prosecutors couldn’t agree more.
Although the Assange file leaker remains at large, if caught, he faces the highest penalty prescribed for those who divulge government secrets: sort-of-consensual sex with a couple of moderately-hot Swedes.
