The article is not completely truthful about what happened, at least according to the police report. The interviewee claims to speak fluent Swedish, so there's no way he'd miss it accidentally. Here's the short version of what happened according to the official police investigation[0]:
Assange and a woman have consensual sex. He wants to have sex without a condom, she insist he wears one. Eventually he agrees, and they have sex and then fall asleep in the bed. The next morning she wakes up by him penetrating her. She asks "are you wearing anything?" to which he replies "you". Her main reason she wanted him to wear a condom was fear of STDs, so she thinks there's no point in stopping now since the eventual damage is already done, so they continue. He comes inside her.
When she later asks the police if there's a way of forcing Assange to take an HIV test the police decides that what she's describing constitutes rape, and starts an investigation.
The whole problem is that she gave her consent under the strict condition that he'd wear a condom. When he started having unprotected sex with her while she was sleeping, he didn't have her consent. Call that what you want.
Edit:
OK, I see that that's mentioned later in the article. But the part about rewriting the statement isn't completely truthful either:
> "Now the supervisor of the policewoman who had conducted the questioning wrote her an email telling her to rewrite the statement from S. W."
What the mail actually says is that there are two hearings, but only one formal one, and they want the second one included too. The supervisor writes: "Make a new hearing. Paste the text in that and assign the hearing to the case. Sign the hearing."
I believe stealthing generally is taking the condom of during sex without her noticing it, but the idea is the same. Consent given under a certain condition is only consent while that condition is met.
I wouldn't believe the police report, the timing of these allegations isn't coincidental, nothing in this case is, and it would not be the first time police have manipulated a witness into giving false or misleading testimony.
While not perfect Sweden is probably one of the most judicially sound countries on earth. I doubt that the Swedish police would intentionally falsify reports/statements to please US interests. This is just absurd.
Melzer has said he was of the same opinion until he started looking into the case.
Don't underestimate how closely tied many European countries are to the United States. Swedish security forces snatched two asylum seekers (that we know of) off the streets in Stockholm in 2001, and handed them over to the CIA. They were immediately flown to Egypt, where they were tortured. All this was done in violation of both Swedish and international law.
Melzer has said in interviews that countries like Sweden have strong legal protections, up until the point at which they consider their own security interests to be at stake. At that point, you can expect all sorts of violations of procedure and law, dirty tricks, etc.
I was trying to find out if they were a reputable news organization, so I did a search, which wasn't very helpful. So then I just started clicking around the website. If you go into Top-Storys, it looks like a link aggregation website even.
Finally, using Chromium, I was able to translate some pages and I guess they are a legit news organization, though quite young. Their first publication was in January 2018. From reading the wikipedia, it seems they operate a bit like lwn, in that direct links will give you the articles, but you don't get access to all of the direct links unless you're a subscriber.
He seems to think the official docs were altered. Either way, his point is that we are all focused on this trial and accusation, rather than the numerous war crimes that WikiLeaks exposed, and that was the intent all along. Mission accomplished.
That's not what's stopping anyone from investigating the war crimes though. Even if Assange never would have com to Sweden and never would have been accused (guilty or not) of rape, those war crimes wouldn't have been any more investigated that they are now. Look at Khashoggi, nothing happened. Look at Russia's annexation of Crimea, there's some sanctions but the current US administration is against them. Look at China, they have concentration camps for Uighurs. And so on.
I don't have any problem believing that Assange did have sex with a sleeping woman without a condom, it fits what I've perceived as his personality. And him locking himself in the embassy after having exhausted his legal means in the UK was his own doing. But that's all about one person, the war crimes are part of a system that doesn't care about him.
> The article is not completely truthful about what happened
The article discusses the exact things you're saying it conceals.
> The interviewee claims to speak fluent Swedish, so there's no way he'd miss it accidentally.
Before accusing the interviewee of dishonesty, perhaps you can read the parts of the article where the interviewee discusses the very things you're saying he omitted. Did you just miss these parts of the article accidentally, or did you intentionally misrepresent the article?
The above comment attacks Melzer as dishonest for omitting information, and says there's no way Melzer could have simply missed the omitted information.
I repeated the commenter's own words back to them, showing the irony that they (the commenter) were the one who omitted information, in a way that is very difficult to explain if they had read the article. I think that's legitimate.
Please make your legitimate points in ways that don't break the HN guidelines. Personally attacking the person you're replying to isn't part of the legitimate point, and is easy to factor out if you want to. For example, your second paragraph there could be reduced to "the interviewee discusses the very things you're saying he omitted", and to make it more helpful, could have included specifics about where and how he discusses those things.
> in a way that is very difficult to explain if they had read the article
It's easy to explain: people remember completely different things in the articles they read, based on their pre-existing feelings and assumptions—just like we see very different things in the world in general. When your feelings and assumptions aren't the same, it's too easy to jump to conclusions about other people, especially online, where we have so little information to go on, and inevitably make up stories about each other to fill in the blanks. (Not talking about you personally—we all do this.) Because these effects lead to stuck, repetitive, and ultimately nasty discussion, the site guidelines try to mitigate them, and commenters here need to follow those.
Someone writes a long comment accusing the interviewee of intentionally omitting information, and forgets that the interviewee talked about that information at length?
My working hypothesis is that the commenter probably only skimmed the article, if that. But the really unforgivable part is that that incorrect comment was then voted to the top of the thread. It looks like a lot of people are voting before reading the article.
I'll keep within your guidelines, but my intention was just to point out the irony of the commenter falsely accusing the interviewee of doing something that the commenter themselves was doing.
Assange and a woman have consensual sex. He wants to have sex without a condom, she insist he wears one. Eventually he agrees, and they have sex and then fall asleep in the bed. The next morning she wakes up by him penetrating her. She asks "are you wearing anything?" to which he replies "you". Her main reason she wanted him to wear a condom was fear of STDs, so she thinks there's no point in stopping now since the eventual damage is already done, so they continue. He comes inside her.
When she later asks the police if there's a way of forcing Assange to take an HIV test the police decides that what she's describing constitutes rape, and starts an investigation.
The whole problem is that she gave her consent under the strict condition that he'd wear a condom. When he started having unprotected sex with her while she was sleeping, he didn't have her consent. Call that what you want.
[0] https://www.magasinetparagraf.se/wp-content/uploads/content/...
Edit: OK, I see that that's mentioned later in the article. But the part about rewriting the statement isn't completely truthful either: > "Now the supervisor of the policewoman who had conducted the questioning wrote her an email telling her to rewrite the statement from S. W."
What the mail actually says is that there are two hearings, but only one formal one, and they want the second one included too. The supervisor writes: "Make a new hearing. Paste the text in that and assign the hearing to the case. Sign the hearing."