WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange last week refuted the dubious rape prosecution Sweden began against him in August 2010.

Assange’s written response on Dec. 7, with his first detailed defense, underscores the disgraceful procedures used by Sweden, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as well as the complicity of mainstream media outlets that primarily published biased accounts.

With the zeal and arrogance of a police state, Sweden has repeatedly violated due process under a veneer of legal and human rights rhetoric.

Sweden's use of sexual misconduct allegations to capture Assange stems from a coordinated reprisal by the three governments for his WikiLeaks publication in 2010 of leaks that included some 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables and “The Afghan Diaries,” a trove of 80,000 documents.

These materials exposed diplomatic hypocrisy (including regarding Sweden's ostensible "neutrality"), suspected war crimes, and cover-up by Sweden and NATO members.

Our defense here of Assange centers on all-important procedural fairness issues, not necessarily his personal behavior while he was in bed with the complainants. Nor is our defense an endorsement of WikiLeaks and the anti-secrecy platform's wholesale release of sensitive documents, including those designed to hurt Hillary Clinton and Democrats in the recent U.S. elections.

Those are more complicated issues than the procedures Sweden used for fact-finding on the rape investigation, as we told RT America host Ed Schultz during a cable TV interview on Dec. 7.

I was invited to provide perspective on Assange's first detailed, public response in legal proceedings to the rape allegation. The New York Times reported the basics earlier that day in WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Denies Rape in Detailed Account of Encounter.

Our focus on due process includes the right to confront witnesses, including the two shown above, before an impartial tribunal in a public proceeding. That is a bedrock of truth-finding, freedom, law-and-order, and many other core human rights values ingrained for centuries in American and English law.

The end does not justify the means, in other words. If Sweden and allied nations want to capture and prosecute Assange for WikiLeaks they should comply with relevant law, and not engage in the legal charade that's occurred for more than six years at vast expense, including to the reputations of the perpetrating nations.

Yet the discussion below — summarizing major developments since we first helped break stories in 2010 showing secret political and intelligence ties behind this witchhunt — contains plenty of material for those who enjoy spy thriller material drawn from real life, and not merely legal abstractions like "due process."

It's not coincidental that The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo hit novel and film series by the late Steig Larsson was set in Sweden's hacking community, or that "James Bond" novel writer Ian Fleming in real life had been a top British intelligence official and later European news editor for the North American Newspaper Alliance, a British intelligence front that pretended to operate as a legitimate news organization.

Earlier this year, as example from the Assange case, a prominent left-wing Swedish journalist who had been attacking Assange, Martin Fredriksson, was exposed as a secret asset of Säpo, Sweden's CIA-affiliated intelligence service, as we reported here.

In 2010, we helped break the Huffington Post story headlined Rove Suspected In Swedish-U.S. Political Prosecution of WikiLeaks. It revealed that former Bush White House advisor Karl Rove served in 2010 as a key advisor to Sweden’s conservative governing party at a time when Rove was advocating on Fox News that authorities execute Assange even before any government had filed any formal charges against him.

As of today, Assange still has not been publicly charged with any crime anywhere in the world, although reports have surfaced that American prosecutors obtained a still-sealed indictment against him on espionage charges related to WikiLeaks.

As for disclosure to the public, Sweden merely says it wants Assange's presence for further questioning about alleged sexual misconduct.

Assange has refused to travel to Sweden for further questions (beyond those he answered in 2010) because he fears Sweden would end the sex case charade soon after his arrival and then extradite him to the United States, where he might be imprisoned for life or even executed. Swedish authorities have pooh-poohed that threat but Sweden's track record in such cases, including this, provides no assurance.

The Beginning: A Speaking Trip To Stockholm

In 2010, the Australian-born Assange was visiting Sweden on a trip featuring a talk in Stockholm. He held celebrity status because WikiLeaks disclosures that year of leaked documents challenged not just war-makers, their financiers, and diplomats but a larger power structure of media, parliaments, courts and other watchdog institutions that were failing to expose government secrets and hold wrongdoers accountable.

PayPal blocked WikiLeaks accounts, making Assange's travel difficult. That rendered Assange vulnerable and more dependent than normal on the kindness of strangers during his trip to Sweden to try to set up servers that might be safe from NATO pressures. Sweden maintained an official stance of neutrality during much of the Cold War but also deep connections between the country's leading institutions and those of other Western nations.

On the trip, a politically active conference manager, “AA,” and then a seeming fan of Assange, “SW,” separately invited Assange to sleep in their beds on different nights of his stay.

Disclosures and analysis at two research conferences last weekend in Dallas confirmed the U.S. majority popular opinion that conspirators murdered President John F. Kennedy in a 1963 plot that authorities have continued to cover up.

Similar analysis shows a cover-up in the 1968 assassination of the leading Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. The combination illustrates the ongoing threat to American presidents since then of attempted assassination, which continues to threaten independent leaders and ultimately democracy itself.

Longtime Republican strategist Roger Stone, a friend and occasional advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, was one of several conference speakers from diverse political viewpoints warning new generations how assassinations poison politics.

"The fact that President-elect Trump has Secret Service protection does not give me solace," said Stone (shown at right), author of the 2013 best-seller The Man Who Killed Kennedy. It blames Kennedy's Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson for using his extensive ties with the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Mafia and Texas law enforcement to orchestrate JFK's murder and a cover up.

"I pray for him every night," Stone said of his friend Trump, whom he described as like JFK threatening corrupt, war-mongering elements of the nation's power structure, "and I urge each of you to pray for the safety of him and his family."

Today, we summarize research presented at these two conferences commemorating the 53rd anniversary of JFK’s death in downtown Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Although speakers aired many differences (with only some placing Johnson as an active planner of the death, as opposed to presiding over the cover up) virtually all speakers cited evidence of horrific government misconduct in the assassination that is trivialized or ignored by current authorities and watchdog institutions.

This editor delivered a featured Saturday evening lecture at the annual JFK Assassination Conference and helped also at the concurrent JFK Lancer November in Dallas event to recruit members of the new research group Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA).

In personal views that are independent of CAPA's or its other directors who spoke at the conferences, I summarized research showing that a high cabal of U.S. oligarchs worked through the CIA to coordinate JFK's death and the frame-up of accused killer Lee Harvey Oswald. This set in motion a murderous cover-up and a series of corrupt civic catastrophes such as the Vietnam War that continue to hurt the nation.

I cited evidence also that all recent presidents after Jimmy Carter benefited from covert ties to the CIA or FBI before they entered politics. These relationships with the power structure that controls those agencies helped them win the presidency. But those relationships also tied each president's hands from providing the kind of justice and other independent decision-making that Americans might expect, resulting in the kinds of outrageous injustices summarized in my recent pre-Thanksgiving column, President Obama, I Beg Your Pardon.

Thus, the government's failure to expose JFK's actual killer set the stage for a cover-up that involves more recent frauds upon the public. Such cowardly watchdog institutions as Congress, the courts, the media and academia ignore these new threats, I argued, as did many other Warren Commission critics supplying specifics from their observation or research.

Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., JD, a pioneering critic of official versions of both the JFK and RFK murders, was a featured speaker at both conferences. Shown in his Pittsburgh lab, he detailed forensic medical evidence showing that official conclusions were medically and otherwise scientifically impossible.

Wecht, 85, drew upon his vast experience as a physician, coroner, professor and attorney to document the physical impossibility that Oswald or accused RFK killer Sirhan Sirhan could have acted alone.

Two wealthy men, Stephen Prince and Eric Schoenberg, this week participated in an unusual lobbying campaign in the nation’s capital by advocating a $15-an-hour minimum wage for all American full time workers.

As two leaders of the non-partisan group “Patriotic Millionaires,” the two described in an interview with the Justice Integrity Project why they support the organization and its goals to reduce income inequality and otherwise foster a better society. The interview took place at one of the long bare tables at the Dirksen Senate Office Building cafeteria. They and a half dozen colleagues and staffers from their Washington, DC-based group were taking a lunch break from their visits to elected representatives.  

“We know there’s going to be a tax cut in the next Congress,” said Prince, shown at right, the vice-chair of Patriotic Millionaires and a Tennessee businessman who founded in 1993 National Business Products, now known as Card Marketing Services. ”But we want to make sure there’s a benefit also for the middle class and the lower-class.”

An increase in the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is the simplest and otherwise best way to ensure that goal, Prince continued.

More generally, he said the economy will improve if ordinary Americans have stronger buying power for low-priced store goods and items like used pickups. He said his experience goes against “trickle down” economic theory that helping the rich benefits lower classes in an efficient manner.

Tax laws already are adequate to enable him to create new businesses successfully as he has in the past, he said. So, he does not expect windfalls from the next Congress in reduced taxes to prompt significant changes in CEOs’ business strategies and personal spending beyond increasing inequality.

Schoenberg, chairman of CampusWorks, Inc., a provider of technology leadership services to universities and colleges, echoed Prince’s goals and conclusions. Schoenberg (shown at left) holds a doctoral degree and also teaches about "family wealth" as an adjunct associate professor at the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

President Obama should pardon the nation’s leading political prisoners and whistleblowers as a lasting legacy, particularly in view of his uplifting rhetoric and his party’s losses Nov. 8.

Justice for those who have been framed in high-profile, historic cases — which include the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy — would provide a vital civic lesson as the nation wrestles with what Electoral College winner Donald Trump has called his campaign for "law and order." Many Americans in the plurality that supported his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton interpret Trump's words, rightly or wrongly, as code for repression.

A bold pardon plan for the Obama administration’s final weeks would channel much of the sadness, anger and bickering prevalent among many Democrats who outvoted Republicans in the popular vote by about one percent but still lost the presidency, Congress, and soon the Supreme Court.

Pardons would redress the Obama administration's failings in several specific criminal cases — and bolster reform efforts more generally, including those envisioned by Republicans.

We recommend (and are doing so in lectures in Washington, DC and Dallas this week) that Obama show mercy to a representative sample of still-living defendants in political prosecutions. In some cases, political leaders were imprisoned for long terms far out of proportion to their conduct. In other instances, patsies took the fall for major crimes and brave whistleblowers were crushed.

These injustices have cleared the way for more powerful malefactors to escape. Perhaps worse, honest law enforcers, whistleblowers, and other good citizens are being discouraged for the future.

Our non-partisan Justice Integrity Project has documented these abuses extensively, as well as the way powerful financial and intelligence operatives assisted the president's early career in secret. Today, we draw on these previous columns and our book, Presidential Puppetry, which contain extensive appendices citing others' reporting and evidence.

The material today is blunt. That's needed to cut through the post-election clutter of punditry. Therefore, the president probably would not like it if he saw this. So, this column is not aimed for his attention but for yours. You cannot pressure effectively without the basic facts.

Several of the recommended pardon recipients, such as President Kennedy's former Secret Service protector Abraham Bolden (shown above), met their unjust fate because their brave whistleblowing sought to redress some of the nation's most outrageous scandals. Malefactors so powerful as to constitute a "Deep State" of hidden government controllers created some of these scandals.

Other defendants, such as Sirhan Sirhan, the accused killer of the leading 1968 Democratic presidential contender Robert Kennedy, appear to have been fall guys set up to hide the intrigues that shape our political landscape today. Even if Sirhan did kill Kennedy, as seems unlikely from the evidence, Sirhan should have been released long ago under standard parole guidelines. Instead, authorities are able to keep any important secrets hidden.

The photo of Kennedy's close friend Paul Schrade at right symbolizes the torment felt by some of those in the know about the nation's deepest mysteries.

The photo was taken by an Associated Press pool reporter during a closed February hearing after California authorities again denied Sirhan parole unfairly and with scant explanation. Schrade was shot by Sirhan in the head during the 1968 killing in a pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. Schrade is among those who believe Sirhan was firing a gun from Kennedy's front and could not possibly also have shot Kennedy from behind with the fatal bullet.

Yet authorities perpetuate the conventional wisdom through the years after destroying evidence, ignoring witnesses like Schrade, and keeping Sirhan behind bars.

Therefore, it would take an act of political courage for President Obama and his team seriously to reopen any of these mysteries. But the important point is that action by Obama would lessen the public's plight, not just that of defendants.

That would make pardons all the more impressive for his legacy because they would illustrate how he changed from his announcement just before taking office in 2009 that he would "look forward, not backward" at alleged government misconduct. Commentators interpreted Obama to mean that he would essentially ignore previous government crime, such as CIA torture.

Obama issued just one presidential pardon during his first term. That was far below the number granted by his predecessors. Obama's first White House counsel, Gregory Craig, has since explained that presidents and governors these days risk hurting their reputations by using their constitutional powers to grant clemency.

So, increasingly, few of them undertake a responsibility that Constitution framers regarded as essential for chief executives to grant, as we reported in a 2012 column Presidential Clemency System Broken, Experts Say. The trend illustrates yet-another aspect of the decline of rule of law and is particularly harmful when used to silence those involved in historic events since at least some person released is bound to become controversial.

Obama granted vastly more clemency actions during his second term. But he took few risks because he and his pardon office at the Justice Department focused on low-profile offenders.

The president reduced 102 sentences last month according to a CNN report, Obama reducing 102 inmates' sentences, the latest batch in a record-setting effort by the White House to reverse harsh sentences for mostly nonviolent drug offenders.

"Obama has now granted clemency to 774 individuals, the vast majority of whom were serving time for nonviolent drug crimes," the report said. "Just in the past year, Obama has granted clemency to 590 prisoners, the most commutations in any single year of US history."

Few of the beneficiaries were known to the public. Thus, the president conserved his political capital especially in his first term by studiously avoiding high-profile clemency that might annoy the nation's power structure, which has been instrumental, if not treasonous, in some of the major cases described below.

Obama Options

The president could simply limp through his remaining weeks and ceremonies (including the annual symbolic pardoning of a turkey at the White House) as he and the nation await the dismantling of his major policies and programs under a Trump presidency and Republican-controlled House, Senate and Supreme Court.

The White House photo above from last year on Nov. 25 displays a feel-good moment. The president, his daughters Sasha and Malia, and National Turkey Federation Chairman Jihad Douglas participated in the annual National Thanksgiving Turkey pardon ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.

But a difference this year is that many people do not feel good and want more than photo ops and rhetoric from leaders.

Scattered signs emerged this week that Republican leaders and activists would continue scorched-earth legal tactics against Hillary Clinton and other Democrats — even as President-elect Donald Trump called for a smooth presidential transition. 

Jason Chaffetz, the Utah congressman finishing his first term leading the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, made clear the partisanship of the presidential campaign "is not going to go away," as the Washington Post reported in Top House Republican says he’ll continue probe of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

“It would be totally remiss of us to dismiss [the email investigation] because she’s not going to be president,” Post reporter Lise Rein quoted Chaffetz (shown in an official photo) as saying of the Democrat's defeated nominee. “I still have a duty and obligation to get to the truth about one of the largest breaches of security at the State Department,” he said. “Tens of thousands of documents still have not been turned over to Congress.”

Meanwhile, Trump's leading surrogates Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani, both former federal prosecutors, were well positioned to help implement the chants of "Lock her up!" that they helped lead against Clinton at Trump's campaign rallies nationwide. This was despite the ostensible comity after the election that others in the Trump campaign are voicing.

On the Fox News Bill O'Reilly Show, Giuliani called for continuing investigation of Clinton. “There’s one tradition in America, right? Election is over. We forget about it," Giuliani said. "There is another tradition in America, which is ‘equal justice under the law,’” Giuliani said. “And it would depend on how bad the violations are.”

Today, we survey these developments and conclude that a radical right infrastructure that thrives on using the legal system to investigate and prosecute Democrats is not likely to stop.

Demonizing the Clintons goes hand-in-hand with besmirching an Obama presidential legacy that has had fewer financial scandals than most. The attacks go a long way to ensuring success for a Republican Party that verged on disintegration just a week ago, at least in the minds of many centrist pundits now proven wrong.

Here is a vital point almost never reported by the mainstream media:

The modern GOP and radical right have a track record of never-ending investigations that demonize and immobilize their Democratic targets. The Whitewater-style special prosecutor investigations throughout the 1990s resulted in relatively little evidence against them personally, aside from the last-ditch and unrelated Monica Lewinsky scandal.

But the continuous probes and headlines kept the Clintons on the defensive and forced hordes of staffers to hire expensive defense counsel for no valid purpose while taxpayers spent millions. Parallel to that was the continuous clamor that Clinton was not the nation's legitimate president because he did not win 50 percent in a three-candidate race, which had its parallels in the "birther" claims that Obama was born in Kenya.

In a similar technique, the Bush Justice Department (including then-New Jersey U.S. Attorney Chris Christie) indicted vast numbers of Democrats on sometimes flimsy evidence, thereby destroying the opposition particularly in Southern and swing states.

Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, one of the Deep South's most popular Democrats, is still imprisoned after being framed for 1999 "corruption" that was not even a crime, properly considered, as we and others have often reported.

Not coincidental is that one of Siegelman's first persecutors and prosecutors was Alabama Attorney Gen. William Pryor, who announced an investigation, aka "fishing expedition," during Siegelman's first month in office in 1999 to try to find corruption.

Authorities never investigated the obvious corruption of Siegelman's trial judge Mark Fuller, chief federal judge in Alabama's middle district of Montgomery. Fuller is shown smirking in chambers in a photo by freelancer Phil Fleming immediately after the Siegelman verdict avoided a hung jury on corruption charges in Siegelman's second trial. Fuller was a Republican partisan forced to leave the bench in 2015 because of a wife-beating scandal.

Victory Paves Way For Solutions, New Opportunists

President-elect Donald Trump’s triumph threatens — hopefully for the better — decades of foreign policy, much of it agreed upon in secret via a bipartisan consensus among elites.

As the campaign made clear, Trump's victory seems likely to block new free trade deals, reduce U.S. tensions with Russia, and curtail both illegal immigration to the United States and covert U.S. efforts to overthrow foreign governments by backing dissidents, civil disturbances, revolutions and foreign wars.

Today’s column and my two scheduled broadcast interviews explore Trump’s likely foreign policy and implementation team. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie leads Trump's transition planning to fill about 4,000 politically appointed jobs overall in the Trump administration, including cabinet posts.

Neither the presidential campaign nor news coverage of Trump’s surprise victory Nov. 8 have addressed in much detail so far foreign affairs and military posts in the next administration, aside from a Washington Post column Nov. 9 that described his planning as "opaque."

The candidate (shown in a file photo by Gage Skidmore) has spoken largely in generalities about foreign policy and has failed to identify and empower top surrogates to speak in detail. Also, the core issues are highly secretive, with specifics often obscured by "national security."

That secrecy is typical even of such high profile issues as fault-finding in the 2012 deaths of four Americans to jihadists in Benghazi.

Neither political party nor official investigators have ever wanted to disclose that the deaths stemmed in part from a covert U.S. operation to smuggle arms and fighters from Libya via Benghazi to Turkey to help overthrow Syria's government in a secret operation that continues to today. For years, we have reported those facts here on the Justice Integrity Project site (in What's Important About Hillary Clinton's Emails, for example) and in our 2013 book Presidential Puppetry.

As a final reason for lack of much public discussion about foreign policy: Trump's victory seemed so unlikely that most power brokers themselves were scrambling after the win to adapt to it. They never seriously undertook most of the preparations typical for inserting their operatives to control new administrations, but are scrambling to do so now.

Voters Reject So-called Experts

Washington hosts a large array of "experts" who counsel both Democratic and Republican administrations and pressuring for certain policies.

They perform such essential functions also as recommending personnel to award contracts, schedule appointments, write speeches, recommend additional appointees (such as judges and prosecutors) and otherwise guide/control the immense power of the federal government. These functions include such Deep State or black operations as electronic surveillance, propaganda, disinformation, arms smuggling, money laundering, and fomenting civil disturbances or even regime change -- all operations theoretically imposed only on foreigners.

Although some genuine differences exist, the overall pattern is for a mind-boggling degree of agreement on such issues as free trade, relaxed immigration enforcement, and covert operations to destabilize governments deemed unfriendly to U.S. economic interests. Our research indicates that the Yale Law-educated Hillary and Bill Clinton, shown in a file photo, have many overlapping relationships with the century-long tradition of bipartisan foreign policy expertise that includes establishment of the Rhodes Scholarship program to enable future leaders like Bill Clinton to attend Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

This consensus should not be surprising. Both Republicans and Democrats have drawn since the 1950s upon the counsel of former National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger, a Republican, and his Democratic counterpart Zbigniew Brzezinski. Kissinger and Brzezinski (whose children have advised presidential candidates of both parties or co-host the weekly MSNC program Morning Joe). Kissinger and Brzezinski shared the patronage of the Rockefeller brothers, the late Nelson and still-living David, and other elites who fund major corporations, foundations and political parties that spread a shared gospel, much to the horror of at least some critics well-connected enough to understand the implications.

Evangelist Pat Robertson, a Yale Law School-educated 1992 candidate for president against both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, authored in 1991 The New World Order that denounced the concept. Robertson voiced such opposition even though he shared many elite connections with his friend Bush, a Skull and Bones member at Yale, scion of U.S. senator like Robertson, and a covert recruit into CIA operations soon after graduation.

Kissinger and Brzezinsky even shared the same academic mentor, William Y. Elliott of Harvard, an advisor to six presidents and advocate of an interventionist foreign policy advancing big business interests of leading UK and US corporations. This is documented by New World Order: A Strategy of Imperialism, an illuminating book this fall by broadcast host and film maker Sean Stone. Stone illustrates how elites for more than a century have shared many common goals, including undermining nation states so that their populations could be more easily controlled.

One method to implement this or any other such idea is control of foreign policy government appointments, creation of expert foundations (like the Rockefeller or Ford Foundations), think tanks like the Council of Foreign Relations, control of intelligence black operations, and influence on the media, including mainstream outlets owned and otherwise controlled by elites.

The Washington Post, for example, has long been a voice for these elites. Its former publisher Eugene Meyer had been a chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank working closely during World War I with Bush patriarch Samuel Bush. Meyer offered to hire Bush's grandson George H.W. Bush promptly upon the latter's graduation from Yale.

Then Meyer's son-in-law and successor Philip Graham worked closely with the CIA in its Operation Mockingbird propaganda program to organize America's top 40 newspaper, magazine and broadcasting executives into CIA-friendly coverage advancing an American empire. Current Post owner Jeffrey Bezos soon after purchase in 2013 for $250 million arranged a contract whereby the CIA pays Amazon.com, which Bezos founded, $600 million for data services.

But those patrons, their experts, their advice, and in effect what might be called their "New World Order" are precisely what Trump and many of his supporters have rejected by thwarting Bush and Clinton candidacies this cycle.