What was Swedish arrest warrant anomaly surrounding Assange about?
In the early hours of Saturday morning on the 21st of August 2010, the Swedish police issued an arrest warrant for Wikileaks’ mystery honcho and guru, Julien Assange, who has in recent weeks become a very mediatised figure. He was wanted, it said, on charges of rape and molestation (against two individual women). A few hours later, the media was baffled as the warrant was cancelled. What might explain it?
1 + 2. Proper functioning of a policing system in response to real allegations
The first two hypotheses are straightforward; maybe it’s true but they don’t have enough evidence for an arrest yet; and all this is unconnected to his threat to release yet more sensitive documents. Maybe it’s untrue, and like some ‘crimes’ reported to the police, that reports turn out to be too shaky.
3. PR test balloon for upcoming smear campaign
Or it really is a smear campaign against Julien Assange. Sex sells. This might at the very least be a ‘test balloon’ by some PR-savvy anti-Assange outfit (the CIA?), wanting to see how the press might respond to a full-on smear campaign. But if this was a wikileaks taskforce’s test balloon, wouldn’t they have done it in a normal newsday?
4. Vaccination by an attenuated pathogen
Assange is pretty damn good at PR himself. What if he’d decided that his best strategy in anticipation of a smear campaign was to vaccinate the media and their readers to smear, and prevent the next allegation from going viral?
Here’s how a smear vaccine might work: find two acolytes to report the alleged rape and molestation on just barely credible terms, and then either have them withdraw them or bring to light certain facts that mean that the charges HAVE to be dropped (factual inconsistencies, for example, or a previous record of crying wolf; etc).
Do this quickly on a Saturday morning when newsrooms are too understaffed to do much reporting and will probably not have much time between the issuing of the charges and the withdrawal to actually spread the uncorrected, damaging rumours; just the retraction.
Result? CNN runs a front page headline next to not-negative press about you (charges withdrawn) suggesting to all its viewers that you might well be the target of a smear campaign. Future journalists AND readers will be immunised and healthily sceptical the next time something like this is comes up.
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