Sweden loves a rebel...

As you walk into the plane, there's a little stand of newspapers to the right. Experiencing my first of many waves of giddiness as I see a Swedish newspaper, I grab it and board.
While settling into my seat, I open the first page...Julian Assange.
Considering Sweden's rather awkward place in the current global uproar over Assange and his leaky business, I brace myself for another derogatory article.
I am happily mistaken.
The very first page of Dagens Nyheter chronicles the life of Assange: his schooling, his parents, his childhood, an unfortunate teenage fatherhood (which gifted him with his premature white hair), his first introductions into hacking and the wild computer world. All in all, the article paints a picture of an extremely intelligent, driven man that the reader is coaxed into admiring and feeling sorry for...hardly the press a rapist usually gets.
Furthermore, Dagens Nyheter interviews a man who had lunch with Julian when he was visiting sweden, saying Assange was here looking into purchasing offices due to Sweden's privacy laws, ironically, that would allow him to work without government grumblings. Then this whole rape thing came out, then it went away the next day, then it came back...ummmm, thats strange...why?
Assange's visit to Sweden and this meeting took place around the same time that the first wave of private files flooded into the international media...timing is everything.
After the see-saw rape charges, Interpol got involved and in less time that it takes to run to 7-11 and buy a condom, Assange was an internationally wanted man.
Since they couldn't get him for leaking this information and have yet to take Palin's advice of "just killing him," they opted for the next best thing: an international smear campaign aimed at tearing the moral fiber of Assange. Through weaving this web of deceit, they mark him as a terrorist, rapist and immoral man, wanting nothing more than to put the lives of innocent, hard working people at stake, while saving some time to rape a few women while on vacation.
So, what do the swedes have to say about this criminal in their midst?
"Julian Assange är mannen som med en väska på ryggen och en laptop i handen rest jorden runt och dyrkat upp hemligheter i yttrandefrihetens namn"
Translation: "Julian Assange is the man whom with a backpack on his back, a laptop in his hand, has traveled the world, digging up secrets in the name of freedom of speech."
This is a quote from one of Sweden's top newspapers, on another top spot article on Assange. But...I thought...wait...it gets better.
Did you know that the site WikiLeaks is hosted by a Swedish company? Again, due to Swedish law, forbidding any administrative authority to make inquiries regarding the sources of any type of newspaper or site, Assange naturally went with the Swedish company PRQ to handle his hosting. On top of Swedish law, PRQ boasts at having "almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs."
So, put together, you have a seemingly indestructible bunker of information with a nice Swedish flag on top.
Wait...there's more...
Ironically, around the same time as the rape charges wish-washed back and forth, the Swedish Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) announced that they would begin hosting and managing new WikiLeaks' new servers, donated free of charge along with free technicians to assure smooth secret spillage.
Research also suggests that some of WikiLeaks' servers are actually housed in an underground nuclear bunker in Stockholm...
And, last but not least, the only place you can still donate to WikiLeaks is via a British-Swedish company called Flatr, created by the same man who created Pirate Bay...
Assange's apparent affinity for Pirates and Sweden aside, how can this clear anomaly of cold hard facts vs. international scandal be explained?
Well, as always...political power. Not even the US can tell Sweden to change its laws. It also can't tell the host servers or the donation site to bugger off. However, they can create a situation where the Swedish government (or really any government) will have no choice but to hand Assange over.
Let's say that Assange is extradited from England to Sweden. From there, the Swedish government will have little clout in keeping the US from muscling him over to red, white and blue. After all, we have to charge him in our courts for some made up bullshit about being a spy...fuck, doesn't this just sound like a really bad daytime TV spy movie? A troubled nerd sleeps with a hot blonde Swedish babe, (or supposedly) becomes the focus of an international conspiracy and is eventually tried for being the spy of all spies!
That'll go straight to DVD...
But back in reality, this is how it would play out. At the moment, the Swedish government is now saying that they don't want to try him but merely clarify what happened...sounds to me like they don't want him over here at all. The less they have to play political chess with the US, the better. Besides, as is glaringly obvious if you look just a little bit past the US media morons - er moguls - you'll find that Assange isn't a bad guy, he's just a rebel...and everyone but the US, particularly Sweden, loves a rebel.