The Death of the CIA “Honeypot” Theory of the Julian Assange Rape Allegations

Angus Johnston, I’m tempted to pity you for having these kinds of illogical commenters on your site! Anyway, thank you for your patience. Thank you. I’m glad to have found you and studentactivism.net this week.

Your posts on this entire matter are a little alarming to me. Regardless of what actually transpired between Assange and his accusers, this strikes me as a particularly dangerous moment in world history to minimize the multifarious ways in which intelligence agencies have intervened in progressive social movements over the past 60 years. Unfortunately, so much as discussing said history, tends to elicit a sort of pavlovian – “nutty … conspiracy theorist … tune-out now” response from many people who really ought to know better. And your quick dismissal of such themes and questions, apparently as a way to support a perversely over-simplified interpretation of the whole Assange matter, really stinks.

You do realize that Ian Fleming worked in military intelligence during the cold war, right? Hence that “vibe” shouldn’t necessarily evoke a sense of fiction. And that, at the very least, certain highly influential feminists did collaborate with the CIA during the mid-cold-war, even if the extent of that collaboration remains unclear?

Why in the world, after all that has happened with civil liberties / surveillance / the war machine during the past decade are you comfortable to treat the possibility of similar influence in this situation so lightly? Abuses of power by the state are no less fundamental to feminism, in the big picture, than are questions of sexual violence.

Its precisely that historical ghettoization of said nefarious histories that concerns me – ie MLK / FBI yes but Assange / CIA = spy novel. IOW – this set of events has given me the distinct impression that many self-proclaimed progressive activists genuinely seem to believe things like shady intel agency business is but a historical curio. I find this infuriating because it forecloses on building alliances between progressives and libertarians around such questions of civil liberties / techno-surveillance et al. Given what I think Naomi Wolf has been doing over the past few years towards this end, I am deeply troubled to see her become a polarizing rather than mind-expanding figure in this scenario. I think that her position makes a great deal more sense in the context of her recent work, rather than just the Beauty Myth, etc. Basically I suspect that we are missing the possibility, yet again, for instigating a very powerful social movement that would hinge on pretty radical left/right coalition building. And I find it untenable, personally, to think that the larger question of government/prosecutorial misconduct (which is what I think is going on here, rather than a “honeypot” per se) can somehow be successfully bracketed in order to allow a more general discussion of sexual violence and consent, in *this* instance. Either way – thanks for the reasonable response.

I don’t know one way or another what the “real story” behind the accuser in question is. I do know that the US intelligence budget strongly supports the idea that we still have more than a few operatives around the world and that, in a broad sense, Lefty organizers have historically been targets of recruitment for intelligence work. That may well not be the case here. But nor is it simply the stuff of spy novels.

Jesse Jane, you can find comments from high-up Wikileaks workers who actually know all three parties involved in this that the whole argument that one of these accusers was a CIA plant is complete and utter bullshit. It’s funny: the closer one is to Wikileaks, to actually knowing people involved or doing the work involved, the more likely they are to say this is not in any way some honeytrap operation.

You are vigorously arguing for the tenuous conclusions of a Holocaust denier. Think about that.

I was talking about the specific arguments Jesse Jane is citing here. Thanks for the condescension, though!

Search for the “thesis”, read it — then tell me what you think.

I’m finishing the last book in the Millennium Trilogy over the holidays. All this makes me thing Stieg should have written the book with Säpo as the good guys, the investigative journalist as the abuser and Lisbeth Salander as a woman too timid to say “no”. That would no doubt please the fools who think the “antioch rules” are “feminist” instead of trivializing rape (which they certainly did by infantalizing women).

If the women approached the police only to request Assange be tested for HIV and it was the police who suggested filing assault charges, we do seem to know that neither woman felt she had been raped.

We seem to have pretty hard evidence that the entire suggestion of rape or assault came from the state, from square one. I am confused as to why this is not taken as proof positive that these charges were created, at square one, by agents of the state?

Further, this seems to hurt future allegations of sexual violence in the following way:

The accusation of rape seems to come from people other than these women reaching their own conclusions about the events recorded in their statements (being held down, having penetration initiated during sleep) and not either party’s own assessment of those events.

Thus if outside parties are the one’s to determine whether or not rape took place by *interpreting* the events, then the corollary interpretation is also validated. That is to say in a different circumstance, a woman who felt she had been raped by psychological intimidation etc. but could not point to some event ala being held down, could be told she had not been raped.

This reminds me of Jaclyn Friedman stating her assumption of one accuser – that “she was afraid” about the accuser who had been held down. Obviously this is possible but stating it as JF did is identical to the police deciding that a given set of events objectively constitutes rape despite the accuser not feeling it did.

This seems like super dangerous territory, if only for the potential future ramifications (ie the corollary described above).

The use of axioms is an interesting issue. I am not familiar with Friedman beyond that appearance with Naomi Wolf. Using the magical powers of Google, I came up with other appearances and notes that didn’t seem as problematic, and which also didn’t put her in the league to go toe-to-toe with Naomi Wolf. By insisting on rigid, legal and state-backed arbitration for matters that are anything but clear, on a very basic level what Friedman was advocating, “affirmative consent”, it’s just dangerous to people. Her shock that someone disagreed took me back to college days, definitely pushing my buttons about a whole way of approaching issues that was popular among some ‘activists’ but didn’t travel an inch beyond their circles.

Wolf’s insistence on moral adulthood, and the facts as best we know them, was an excellent counter-example. Without beating up on Friedman, I hope very much she realizes the damage her position does, thinks it through and exercises her own moral adulthood to change her approach.

I remain unable to understand how Wolf was making a stand for moral adulthood by defending a man’s right to penetrate an unconscious woman against her express wishes. I am open to accepting that Friedman’s shock and tone may have made her seem in some ways like a college activist — she did to me as well in some ways — but Wolf genuinely did not have the most cogent argument, nor one most conversant with the facts of the case as we know them. Wolf had to contort what is known in order to make her points and truly ended up coming off, to me, as someone who could genuinely not reconcile her suspicion of state motives and support for Assange and Wikileaks with the possibility that he could be a flawed individual with difficulties respecting the boundaries of his sexual partners. These are not things an adult should have trouble holding in his or her head at once. This is a difficult case because of the issue of state intervention and political motives but if you cannot argue that without disingenuous arguments you should perhaps cede the mantle of feminist public intellectual to another.

Wolf’s point that consent was negotiated again was as specious as an argument about consent can possibly get. Assange may not even be charged or may have not done any of these things, but if the allegations were true the fourth count is a very clear case of violating all terms of that negotiated consent. Again, it has been a very long time since I’ve seen a public intellectual twist facts so disingenuously, and Friedman’s manner and possibly poor response to this doesn’t change that for me.

These allegations paint a portrait of moral adulthood on the part of the alleged victim in question, in which she allegedly said she would not engage in intercourse without a condom and negotiated with Assange over this, saying no unless conditions were met. Assange is then alleged to have ignored her clear “no” by penetrating her without a condom and against her express wishes and her earlier refusals — and to have waited to do it while she was asleep or half asleep.

Regardless of what the state chose to do, I just can’t comprehend how Wolf’s contortion of the facts represents a stand for moral adulthood. One party is alleged to have negotiated consent in all the ways Wolf extols; the other is alleged to have ignored his partner’s explicit terms.

On a purely ethical level, Wolf was arguing for a man’s right to penetrate a person against her express wishes, saying that if the woman gives in once that boundary has been crossed no violation has taken place, and I find that to be the opposite of moral adulthood. I expect far better from grown-ups and am frankly horrified by any standard in which someone can defy my wishes about what can and can be done to my body and consider that defiance part of a “negotiation.”

“You can’t set aside that when you get up in the morning, get back into bed, begin sex “half asleep” quote unquote, then discuss continuing sex — that is definitely, 100% not rape. Sorry, but if you think some guy should go to prison for 10 year and be smeared as a rapist for life, you need to think your parameters through again.”

I keep asking people again and again why they must twist the facts of this case in order to make their points, and here you are twisting the facts of this case as “beginning sex” and then discussing continuing sex. Regardless of whether what is alleged is what happened, what is alleged is that one individual actually penetrated another against her express and vigorously negotiated conditions. This is not “beginning sex” as if he is making advances, kissing her, initiating some kind of mutual interaction; this is a man penetrating her against her known wishes and conditions and doing it without asking, as she is alleged to have awoken to him penetrating her.

Asleep or half asleep doesn’t really matter if what we’re talking about is one individual beginning an act of penetration against the other’s known wishes, and without consultation.

“If a woman forgets to take her pill, then has sex with her partner without informing him — that’s bad behavior, but it is not rape.”

That’s not a directly equivalent hypothetical to the hypothetical we’re discussing.

“So are you arguing that he raped her for a period of time, stopped raping her at her request, and she then decided to have sex with him after some period of time, later?”

I am saying that I have no idea what actually happened, only that the allegations as we know them, and the timeline as we’ve been given — whether any of it actually happened — contains a clear instance of rape.

“I’m also trying to not pass judgment on a hypothetical situation that seems very cut and dry because it seems to be a heuristic tool that can be mirrored back onto a situation I think is not cut and dry. That strategy implies a philosophy I reject.”

And I would suggest this is a serious cop-out following your statement that “the events described here sound pretty unpleasant and kind of dark but really don’t sound like rape.”

All I am saying is that non-consensual sexual acts are rape, and that it is not necessary to cede that ground in order to defend Assange against state actors. In fact, I’d say it is a dangerous path to take. What the individual ended up believing doesn’t really matter if the core of what you’re arguing for is that there can be instances in which defying someone’s express wishes about what can and can’t be done with his or her body, and doing it while the person is unconscious or not fully conscious, is not rape.

A person can be raped and not consider it rape — this happens often in marital rape. I am not talking about how any given state chooses to define rape or anything relating to state intervention; my interest is in the definition of the term and the idea of consent as a core human right. I don’t believe in setting an ethical standard based on how someone feels about a clear violation of basic boundaries. and again would suggest that is a dangerous path as well.

I genuinely feel you are making an appeal to a deceptive simplicity that, IMHO, is actually a rather strong statement about whether relationships are actively negotiated relationally between individuals or by reference to a set of codes arbitrated by some sort of body of power.

I would suggest you try this experiment – communicate the same sentiment without the word “rape.” IE A person can [participate in a sexual act without their consent] and believe that they gave consent? A person can be [forced to engage in a sexual act] and not believe they were forced? A person’s body can be [penetrated against their will] and they can believe it was not against their will?

This amounts to saying: a person may be wrong about their own experience. While this may describe someone who does not understand their legal or human rights to offer or deny consent, it should not apply to whether or not a person gets to define and understand the ethics of their own body and boundaries. If someone initiated sex with me in my sleep, I then woke, asked them to stop and then decided to have sex with them after all, I would be utterly incensed to be told I had been raped. Period. And you or anyone else claiming the right to declare the ethical nature of that process of negotiation is 100% not a step towards the preservation and protection of human rights.

I do, of course, agree that people can be misled to believe they have an obligation to offer their body and sexuality in order to fulfill a contract. This might apply as well to human trafficking as to marital rape. Both are problems in which someone has been led to believe that, due to a contractual obligation, their right to consent (regardless how it might be derived) has been forfeited. That is to say – you cannot equate a person in the A/B scenario above who does not consider herself to have been raped with someone who has been raped in a marriage because she believes she does not have the human right to deny consent to her spouse.

If a person penetrates someone else in their sleep against their wishes (and again, I do believe that asleep/half-asleep tell two very different stories), then yes, a violation of boundaries has taken place. The significance of that violation is a reflection on the sum total picture of the earlier negotiation of consent such that I think only the offended party could possibly be the one to decide the extent thereof. But the violation of boundaries does not always amount to rape. If the person being penetrated, at that point, decides he/she has been raped, I have no reason to disbelieve them. But if he/she feels she successfully evaded a greater assault and chooses to frame his/her experience in terms of almost being raped, or if the violation felt to that person to be something else entirely etc, I also have no reason to disbelieve them.

Explain again how acting on someone else’s body without consulting them — asleep or half asleep, the issue is that there was allegedly no consultation, no negotiation, just one individual acting on the other against that person’s well-articulated wishes — has anything to do with anything being actively negotiated relationally between individuals. Until that point is resolved I can’t go forward. I am not talking about codes or bodies of power; I am talking about the ethics of interpersonal relations here. Again, I ask you to consider the ethical standard you’re setting up with regard to body autonomy.

I’ve called the hypothetical situation redolent of sexually predatory behavior, said it clearly indicates a boundary violation, said it probably constitutes legal grounds for rape and said that if the individual feels she was raped, I would believe her, etc. I have only stopped short of saying – this set of circumstances can be objectively defined as always and evertime a completed event of rape based on some essential, universal criteria *even if* that is at odds with the offended person’s own reasonable opinion of the experience (ie based on good information about consent as a human right, not through brainwashing, being of sound mind etc).

I neither believe nor am I suggesting that retroactive consent is valid, either legally or ethically. If something I said “suggests” that, it is a finer point demanding more specific exploration.

I am confident my larger point has been stated as clearly as I am capable of doing – that an individual (presuming reasonable education and health, etc) is always a better judge of his/her experience than the state.

And yes I am (ever so somehow wildly irresponsibly) suggesting that, situations being unique, there may well be instances in which the status of initiating penetration with a half-or-un-conscious person may hover between rape and a-serious-boundary-violation-very-often-likely-to-lead-to-rape. But I think it is simply a falsehood to pretend that *any* semantic term (in this case “penetration” for example) could be so precisely and effectively defined that it should take precedence over an individidual’s report of their own experience.

In fairness, it is not bad luck – my commentary is definitely motivated by a specific subset of the #mooreandme discourse, so I take full responsibility for getting myself into a certain conversation. I do appreciate that exchange very much and think it is a particularly important thing these days when dissenting opinions are publicly expressed with civility and honorable discourse. Best.

Arkay, I find your reasoning and, particularly, your presumptions both literally appalling and very telling in terms of where you seem to be coming from. I need to settle down a bit before I respond but very much hope you will check back in order to hear what I have to say given that you claim to have departed with a pretty scathing and highly provocative criticism of me individually. I ask Angus, respectfully, to keep this thread open long enough for that to happen. Thanks.

“Do you even have a clue that men are also the victims of sexual violence?”

This is what I’m talking about re: condescension and painting others’ positions as something other than they are. The fact that you would even think I am callous to this or unaware of these very basic and very vital things has been very irksome to me, and I am sorry but your positions do remain intellectually and ethically unsound and cannot be argued without a bunch of frills. And things like “very telling” are no more even-handed than is my saying your ideas are unsound, which is, at least, about ideas an not a matter of declaring your motives or ideology suspect.

I quoted Melissa McEwan because that paragraph sums up how these kinds of lofty discussions that chip away at foundational feminist thought make me feel. You are welcome to take that as some sort of personal dig at you or to respond with suggestions that I am arguing from some place I am not or have motives I don’t, but your response (hey look what I did there!) does not make my act (!) anything other than what it was: an expression of how I feel when reading these truly bankrupt arguments.

I did not “marginalize you halfway to Mars.” I quoted something that expresses better than I can how this conversation makes me feel. And nothing I’ve said has been in defiance of my own belief in survivor-driven response. It has been in defense of a very basic human rights idea that I will not cede ground on or muddy for the purposes of semantics. This is about defending the idea of body autonomy, not about telling survivors how they must think about what happened to them, nor what they should call it. It’s about *preventing* rape, and it is *absolutely* unsound and troublesome to argue, in a world in which rape is so prevalent, that doing something to another’s body against their wishes and will can be something other than what it is because of how the acted-on party receives it. This is basically creating a framework that makes the cultural practice of “victim blaming” into a defensible position.

You are welcome to take that quote as an assault on my motivations, but that does not make it something other than a quote expressing my frustration with these intellectual discussions that at the core just dismantle hard-fought feminist ideas that exist to protect us, men and women, from trauma and dehumanization. You are interpreting it differently than it was meant.

By condescension I’m talking largely about responses to Angus, not to me. But I did find your response condescending, as though *I myself* or any lefist/radical/anarchist/insert ideology here would not have considered the very obvious employment of state power in this case. My response about specific arguments was about specific arguments that Shamir unleashed onto the internet.

I agreed with a lot of your other early points about the efficacy of using this instance to discuss consent, but considering that people like yourself have been forcing that conversation by behaving as though now is the time to start chipping away at ideas meant to bolster basic body autonomy as a human right, such a conversation is inevitable. I really wish we weren’t having it. I can’t *help* but have it when I see intelligent people saying some of the kinds of things you’re saying here, or arguing that Naomi Wolf’s patently obvious intellectual contortions were somehow admirable. I have no position on Wolf one way or the other but can’t even fathom how you could receive her odd arguments about how consent was negotiated again and again to be anything but desperate, frantic semantics. I cannot throw out intellectual rigor here to start arguing inanities just because there are real questions of state intervention at hand.

Because what we are arguing is not just about this case, and your positions ultimately chip away at body autonomy being a meaningful idea.

As I see it, the crux of this debate was about whether or not a universal standard of sexual assault should always take precedence over a sound-minded individual’s conflicting characterization of their own experience, whether the same standard can be effective both legally and ethically, and whether or not that universal standard is threatened (and what the ramifications might be) if the answer is no.

Exploring these questions is, to me, more like “filtering the waters” than “muddying” them. And it seems like a very natural response to the Assange case in which two progressive paradigms collided rather unpleasantly, suggesting some urgency in negotiating a working relationship between them.

I strongly predict the sorts of questions suggested here are going to emerge with much greater frequency in coming years and that all sorts of accepted ideas about how we secure human rights in an arguably lawless world will need to be actively re-negotiated in light of what increasingly looks like emergent fascism and the subsequent impossibility of depending on its institutions.

If you are arguing this:

“As I see it, the crux of this debate was about whether or not a universal standard of sexual assault should always take precedence over a sound-minded individual’s conflicting characterization of their own experience, whether the same standard can be effective both legally and ethically, and whether or not that universal standard is threatened (and what the ramifications might be) if the answer is no.”

You do not say this:

“the events described here sound pretty unpleasant and kind of dark but really don’t sound like rape.”

You, as an outside observer with no way of knowing the alleged victim in question, decided that what happened to her doesn’t “sound like rape.” All the, sorry to say, *pseudointellectual* posturing in the world does not change this, especially considering that what we know from people who actually know the alleged victim in question is that she considers sex without a condom unthinkable. When you declare that something that is *clearly* and by definition non-consensual to not really look like rape, you are doing harm. You are making it harder for future survivors to choose, should they want to, to call what happened to them rape, and you are legitimizing the beliefs of those who always blame the alleged victim first.

No one is dictating what someone should call their experience. Your criticisms of the legal aspects are just weak beyond belief and do not apply to replicable circumstances in jurisdictions other than Sweden. Yes, it looks in this case as though these women went to the police for one purpose and the police decided that what happened to the particular alleged victim in question was rape, whether she saw it that way or not. That choice on behalf of that particular state is not relevant to the wider discussion of how we define rape in order to prevent rape, and these are not two progressive paradigms in conflict — the phenomenon that has arisen around this is one of people either never having learned about or actively selling out one belief — that of some manner of consent being necessary for sex — in order to privilege other beliefs. I do not have to do away with one idea to support another belief, and believe me that when you insist in this case on chipping away at consent and what it means you are privileging one thing over another at the expense of many, many people.

We have to have some sort of standard for what rape is if we are to prevent rape, and non-consensual sexual acts imposed by one person on another is a pretty sound standard. One can experience such a thing and not consider it rape, for for the sake of preventing rape and upholding body autonomy, having a firm ethical line is quite important. I maintain that you are making largely unintelligible arguments here.

I have no idea what purpose that quote from Assange is supposed to serve in this discussion. I also don’t think he is “neutralized” or that a person can act in ways that are contrary to the way they would present themselves. Misogynistic beliefs and acts by leftist heroes is a mainstay of anti-oppression movements.

As far as hitting him in the place where it presumably hurts most, I would suggest that this is not a place that hurts him most or he would not be declaring Sweden to be “the Saudi Arabia of feminism” or spreading lies about radical feminism being a war on men, which is essentially how he has comported himself in the past few weeks. A person who believes in gender equality and victims rights would not so easily sell out these things for his own defense.

As someone who has spent actual time around Assange I would suggest that his self-interest and ego seem to come first. This is of course just an anecdotal observation, but I find it funny that anyone would consider that anything in that quote truly represents things that, when hit, might hurt him most. His recent comments regarding this case suggest that he is not actually situated in such a place so much as he is in a place of self-promotion.

And I believe that promoting Wikileaks is important too and am not denouncing his efforts to publicize it. I would just suggest that pure altruism was never his goal, only his advertisement for a variety of goals, some good, some fairly self-serving.

Also I have to say that whether we’re considering the legal term, an ethical standard, or something else, there will always be a need to define what is consensual and what is not and hinging things on what various parties might label something or how efficacious it is to extend that label across contexts or creating a “universal standard of sexual assault” is missing the very large point that there will always be a need to define a non-consensual sexual act as *something*, to define what consent is and, by the act of defining it, what “non-consensual” is. This is not about the universal standard of sexual assault; it is about what is consensual and what is not. The issue is body autonomy and the act of ignoring it to one’s ends, not the term used to describe it, or its legal definition, or “universal standards” or anything else. Throw out the word “rape” and you still have the act of non-consensual sexual acts on another’s body. This will *always* be central to any debate. And by definition it will vary from case to case because *consent* is unique in each case, is an individual decision.

This all applies to my objection to your statement about how what we know of the Assange case is “dark” but “not rape,” because if you throw out the term rape itself or even the idea of applying some sort of standard you are still saying that a by-definition non-consensual sexual act does not look like a “non-consensual sexual act.”

And with that I am truly done with engaging your sophistic fake-intellectual thought experiments.