Last edited Wed Nov 28, 2012, 10:33 PM - Edit history (1)
Truth of Assange is stranger than fiction
April 12, 2012
Elizabeth Farrelly
... It's quite clear that Assange is not guilty - not of rape ... As Malcolm Turnbull, responding to Gillard's "illegal" claim ... it is prima facie clear that Assange has broken no Australian law ...
Assange has been under house arrest for 15 months. His family are in hiding and governments all over the world vilify him. A US sealed indictment could deliver decades in prison, or worse, his lawyers claim. Yet he has not been charged ...
Yet the Sweden-US bilateral extradition agreement requires neither charge nor evidence. The minute he lands in Sweden, Assange can be locked up in solitary, incommunicado, and indefinitely without charge.
Or he can be shuffled straight onto the US extradition plane and, under sealed indictment, into the secret horror of a grand jury. There will be no judge, and no defence materials. Just a jury drawn from the most militarised area of the US - Alexandria, Virginia ...
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/truth-of-assange-is-stranger-than-fiction-20120411-1ws4o.html
For all I know, Farrelly is an entirely competent adjunct lecturer on architecture.
But there are great lacunae in her understanding of the law, which she fills by spouting various versions of Assangist nonsense. By babbling, for example,
... he can be shuffled straight onto the US extradition plane and, under sealed indictment, into the secret horror of a grand jury. There will be no judge, and no defence materials. Just a jury drawn from the most militarised area of the US ...
she shows she has not the slightest clue what a "grand jury" is -- a gross cultural ignorance that seems somewhat less justifiable, given the fact that grand juries were sometimes employed in Australia until as late as 2009, which ought to be within the memory of anyone Down Under who has been actually been paying attention. Similarly, she exhibits not the slightest familiarity with any EU extradition treaties. Moreover, sex with an unconscious woman is regarded as rape in many countries (including Sweden and the UK), and it is not at all clear that sex with an unconscious woman is legal in Australia, regardless of Farrelly's stated certainty that Assange is innocent of rape.
The bottom line, of course, is that, as a columnist, she is hired to draw readers to the pages in which she is published, tio benefit the advertisers appearing therein, which is not at all necessarily the same as being a reliable source of information
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