Aside from obscure statutes to do with privacy, computer misuse etc he may or may not (probably not) have been actually guilty of under Swedish law, I'd have thought anti-terrorism legislation (fewer legal safeguards, more reason to seize Wikileaks' digital assets) would have provided the perfect opportunity to put him out of action, as well as being the basis for all these renditions Assange-supporters keep referring to.

If a government conspiracy really wants someone in jail, it's a lot easier to make a proper false allegation - of pretty much any sort - with evidence under their control rather than try to force an existing totally unexpected and rather wobbly one to stand up.

On the other hand, prosecutors and police investigators regularly have differences in opinions about the merits of pursuing borderline sexual misconduct or domestic violence accusations with unenthusiastic witnesses without any semblance of a conspiracy whatsoever.

You'd still have to extradite. I don't see that happening in those cases, for one the EU in general (even the UK, or at least that was the situation in the past, May is an unknown quantity in this respect) has a dim view of the 'war on terror' as it is perpetrated by the US, for another the UK is pretty good when it comes to being consistent in their application of the law. More so than Sweden in any case.

I would also argue the international sentiments since 2012 towards the US's "war on terror" are radically different than they were in 2001-2003. In eg December 2001 the US leaning on a friendly European country saying "but 9/11" packed a much larger punch than the US standing on the corpses of Iraq & Afghanistan saying the same thing.

I mean, I know the US burned a lot of international goodwill invading a country (Iraq) that was completely un-involved with the attack on false pretenses (weapons of mass destruction) while ignoring the mastermind (bin Laden) for a decade, all the while more-or-less flaunting an illegal off-shore prison where hundreds of people, some of whom were definitely innocent and many of whom weren't particularly guilty, in inhuman conditions, but try to remember what things were like immediately after the attacks.

Back in 2001-2003, America was still the good guys, and we'd just had two 100-story skyscrapers in our largest city destroyed in a morning, with thousands of people killed. Hell, at the time we thought it was tens of thousands. Other countries - Sweden and Italy and everyone else - weren't bending over backwards to help us extraordinarily rend people because the CIA has magic powers and can do anything they want, anywhere they want. They were complying because, well, shit, 9/11.

Not since World War II did the US have that much goodwill and they managed to squander all that and then some in a very few years.

You could very well argue that Bin Laden won, especially because I highly doubt a guy like Trump would be able to win the presidency if 9/11 never happened and Trump is doing more damage to the United States' interests at home and abroad than the last 6 presidents combined.

All that's still missing is a war.