LONDON, Great Britain, Dec. 7 — Earlier today, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange turned himself in to members of London’s Metropolitan Police to respond to a Swedish warrant charging him with sexual misconduct.

Assange had been in hiding for over a week following the initial release of diplomatic dispatches by U.S. officials that has led to the original WikiLeaks website being atacked and then closed, their bank accounts frozen, and politicians in Washington and other countries denouncing him as a “terrorist.”

The WikiLeaks founder faces a Dec. 14 hearing in London about whether he will be extradited to Sweden for arrest and trial.

The political representatives of the American ruling classes were quick to praise London for their detention of Assange and looked forward to his extradition to Sweden, mainly because Washington has their own treaty with Stockholm. This means that after Assange deals with these weak and possibly fabricated charges, he will be quickly taken away by American agents and whisked away to some CIA “black site” and tortured for
information before being dumped off at the Guantánamo Bay concentration camp.

Assange, an Australian citizen, refuses to allow himself to be extradited to Sweden and continues to make applications for bail.

There is good reason for Assange to refuse extradition. The charges he faces there appear, at best, to be overblown and forces. At worst, they are the most shameless attempt at a frame-up of someone declared an “undesirable” by Washington and its allies.

For example, the “WikiLeaks volunteer” who has made the most serious accusations against Assange, Anna Ardin, has direct connections with CIA-funded rightwing anti-Castro Cuban individuals and groups, both inside and outside of Cuba, including the so-called “ladies in white” and the notorious anti-Castro terrorist Luis Posada Carilles.

Moreover, the comments made by both women after their encounters with Assange read more like a celebration of a great conquest, not women who had been assaulted.

In many ways, the so-called “rape” charge is a vile insult to women who have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. The only substance to the charge is that Assange did not wear a condom (or it broke, or both), which Assange is a crime in Sweden on a par with spitting on the sidewalk or littering. That the Swedish prosecutors would turn to Interpol to pursue a rapist would be positive if Assange was one.

However, the fact that this is the only time such a pursuit was requested, and not in the other times women have been raped and their attacker fled across the border, exposes that the charges are merely a smokescreen.

The reason these charges exist (after being dropped at least once already in August) is because they provide a “legal” pretext for Washington to get its hands on Assange so they can persecute him as a “terrorist” and imprison him under the Espionage Act of 1917.

The Espionage Act was the basis for the “red scare” during and after the First World War, when self-described anarchists, socialists and communists, organizers from the IWW and other unions, and other activists were imprisoned for their politics or opinions.

Assange is going to be used as an “example” of how this profoundly anti-democratic act will be rehabilitated by the “mainstream” of the ruling classes’ political system, which will then pave the way for using it against all manner of political dissent and opposition, especially working-class opposition, to the capitalists and their “middle class” managers.