Yesterday the founder of the whistle blowing website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was charged by Swedish authorities with rape. It made front page news in this country because WikiLeaks has made public documents that suggest the American military, intelligence community, and key members of two administrations have been consistently misrepresenting their horrendously bungled Afghanistan adventure.
Today, according to news reports, Julian Assange is no longer suspected of rape in Sweden, and no longer going to be arrested there. Could it be that some Swedish authorities were briefly cooperating with elements of American officialdom to discredit a person who has exposed said elements mishandled Afghanistan dealings? Or was this bogus charge against a whistle blower something that just happened to pop up at this time?
I can’t say for sure, of course. But what I can say is this plot line bears a strange, almost eerie resemblance to the plot of a trilogy of novels I just finished reading, books written by Stieg Larsson and usually referred to by the title of the first book in the trilogy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Along with its revelation that Swedes are hopelessly addicted to coffee drinking on virtually every occasion and any time of day or night, the books follow the story of Lisbeth Salander, whose life has been made a hell because a group of crazies inside Swedish intelligence thought it had to do this in order to cover up their own unwholesome doings.
Larsson’s trilogy has become an international sensation and been read by virtually everyone who reads good novels in this country — presumably including some folks within our own intelligence community.
So…did American novel reading intelligence operatives, perhaps unconsciously, attempt to do in real life to Assange using Swedish fronts, what was done in fiction to Lisabeth Salander? Could this be a case of dumb life imitating excellent art? Or possibly the result of too much coffee drinking in the wee hours at the Pentagon?
Nah. Silly notion. I apologize. I mean, the people setting and carrying out our policies in Afghanistan are the nations’ best and brightest. Right? At least the best and brightest who are not employed on Wall Street. So it all must be just one big coincidence.
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