I agree that there is no hard proof that the US or US interests are involved in the Swedish handling of the case (doesn't mean it's not a factor though).

There is however proof that the case is politically motivated and used for political purposes in Sweden itself since the case was revived by a Swedish politician through a prosecutor in Gothenburg after the case was dismissed by the previous senior prosecutor in Stockholm.
This politician who is also currently the lawyer representing the women has a definite political agenda:

http://tinyurl.com/6cclg2r (Wikipedia)

I'm afraid you already cited that justification and then discarded it:

More selective reading and reporting by the press: I think it's important to realize that this reading of the defense outline of Assange lawyers as if the argument about a possible extradition to the US is somehow major or even central point of the defense is completely false.
The argument of the risk of torture or execution resulting from possible extradition to the US from Sweden is merely partial support for an auxiliary argument his lawyers are reserving the right to make.

In fact most of the defense focuses on showing that the Swedish issued European extradition warrant was unlawful and constitutes an abuse of process:
You can read the full outline of the defense here (PDF): http://www.fsilaw.com/~/media/Files/Assange%20Skeleton%20Argument%2011_01_2011.ashx

Essentially, yes.

Feyerabend never expressed any opposition to science in principle, he expressed opposition to the poverty of philosophical accounts of how science is supposed to work and against claims to some kind of absolute scientific authority: you cannot argue that the results, practices and consequences of science should be accepted simply because they are "scientific" and produce "truth" or "objective facts". They should be judged like any other human activity on their relative merits and consequences. Those merits and consequences for Feyerabend are weighed against the idea of liberty, the maximum individual freedom for all given that the exercise of that liberty may not cause harm to others.

You can argue that science is useful, successful, interesting, inspiring, that it allows us to understand more about how the world functions, that it allows us to do things we deem to be in the human interest but you can not claim that the practices and results of science should be simply accepted because they produce "truth". The reason for that is that there is in fact no such thing as a "scientific method" there is the scientific process which does not allow itself to be captured in formulas or definitions, therefore there is no epistemological grounding for the claim that science leads to truth and since it cannot be shown to be a reliable source of "truth" it should not be allowed to outweigh considerations of human liberty.

First of all there is of course no objective measure of quality of life. Feyerabend argued for a version of Mills liberty in which there is maximum individual freedom given the provision no harm is done to others.

The argument is simply that there is no absolute justification for science. Since there isn't one there are two debates you can choose from:

The debate whether science leads to objective truth and should therefore be accepted over any other world view no matter what the consequences, or the debate of whether science is a better world view on other (contextual) grounds (utility, considerations of quality of life etc.).

There is disagreement on both and I think the second one is a more fruitful and less dangerous debate.

I should perhaps clarify I'm in no way favoring voodoo over science. I love science and I'm happy with a lot of things it has brought me personally and mankind in general. Regarding religion I'm either an atheist or an agnostic depending on how you define religion. Exactly because of that I'm not going to become a believer in some new absolute "religion" of science either, since there are no convincing arguments for judging science on anything other than it's contextual merits. You see the philosophical ideal of an absolute justification of science is simply a form of totalitarian thinking that has nothing to support it.

I never said we had an objective measure of quality of life. There isn't one. Everybody disagrees. Decisions are reached in many ways, discussion, dictatorship, democracy etc.
Feyerabend's answer was a version of Mill's ideas on freedom in which there is the least possible interference in people's individual choices about their lives given the provision that they do not harm others.

I should clarify that I'm not at all opposed to science, on the contrary, I find much of it interesting, inspiring and I think it has brought us a lot of good on the whole. On the other hand a blind believe in science because it's supposed to lead to some kind of TRUTH with a capital T and should therefore be accepted no matter what the consequences for human lives can be a very dangerous thing. Science is a human endeavor that is not isolated from the rest of human endeavors, aspirations or desires, including the more nefarious ones. It is not isolated from the application of scientific knowledge for all kinds of different purposes, some good some bad, some mixed and it is not isolated from all kinds of influences in its functioning and the application of it's fruits.
I'm also either an agnostic or an atheist depending on how you define religion. I do not propose we replace science with voodoo. I do however agree that the choice between science and voodoo is not one that should be based on arguments that one or the other is "true" or "false" but on arguments that are based on how they affect our lives.

You see the choice is to get into a discussion of whether science is more true or objective than some other world view, or a discussion of whether science leads to a better more desirable world than some other world view. There is no agreement about either and I think the second discussion is much more fruitful.

You simply take the claims about what defines "scientific method" and the examples used to illustrate that claim and show that the reality did in fact not conform to those definitions and that the claimed successes of that method were in fact made possible only by violating the terms of that definition.
You are, I think, confusing the scientific method as used by what we tend to call scientists with the definitions of the "scientific method" and idealized examples used by philosophers of science.

And who says considerations of quality of life are objective? Feyerabend's thinking on quality of life is based loosely on the work of John Stuart Mill's which addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. If science threatens that liberty by making totalitarian claims (i.e. science is absolutely justified because it has a method and/or epistemological foundation that leads to objective truth) they should be resisted because no such claim has been substantiated and they constitute a fundamental attack on human liberty.

That something is justified doesn't mean it's necessarily justified. Most things are in fact justified only within specific contexts.

Feyerabend's argument is that the fact that science has enabled us to think about and interact with the world in ways we enjoy or find useful in no way validates claims that science leads to objective truth and in fact no such claim can be substantiated because the "scientific method" can be historically refuted and satisfactory epistemological justifications simply do not exist (well you can try to come up with one but I wouldn't advise that undertaking, it has been shown to be historically most unfruitful).

In the absence of an absolute justification Science is contextually justified by the fact that we find it enjoyable, interesting, useful, inspiring, that it gives us useful ways to interact with the world, that it enhances our understanding of processes in that world etc. If the products or process of science do not provide those incentives you cannot argue it should be accepted anyway because it's "objectively true".

Actually unlike most philosophers of science Feyerabend did very extensive historical studies showing that the nicely streamlined philosophical schemes of how the scientific process was supposed to work did not actually occur in reality and that the rules of "scientific method" were broken at every turn even for those scientific discoveries that are always held up as the shining examples of the scientific method at work. What he showed was that if scientists had adhered to this philosophical fiction (pleonasm) of a scientific method many of the great discoveries and revolutions in science would not have taken place. The two deepest conclusions from Feyerabends work are:

1. That you can't let philosophers legislate for science because they will end up destroying it.
and

2. That science, since it has no real epistemological foundation is no more justified in claiming to be discovering objective truth than, say, a voodoo priest and that therefore the authority of science should only be accepted in as far as it improves our quality of life.

Feyerabend was in fact a pretty subtle philosopher but because of a combination of irreverence towards the great names and myths of science (mainly Popper and The Scientific Method), a polemic style of writing, a deeply humanistic view of the world and it's affairs and the fact that he was attacking the philosopher's misguided dreams of an epistemological foundation of science he has been consistently misread by whole generations of scientists and philosophers. In my book he is one of the great philosophers of the 20th century and one of the great humanist thinkers in the history of philosophy. Coincidentally almost everyone I have read on Feyerabend seems to completely miss the point that he was in essence a humanist thinker who's main aim was protecting humans against totalitarian, authoritarian and absolutist claims of science and scientific progress.

Nope

Oh wow! The USA is better then Russia, China and even N. Korea? You guys set yourselves some pretty high standards then...

Unlike the US which has not just been accused of "endangering lives" without any facts whatsoever to back up the claim.
We know for a fact that the US is directly responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the last 10 years only and destabilizing two countries so badly that the death toll runs in the hundreds of thousands. But never mind that, let's return to some more pressing issue, like the size of Assange's ego or whether wikileaks should have released that cable about Batman and Robin in Russia.

There corrected it for you.

And people are railing against specific actions and attitudes of the US government, which now, thanks in large part to Wikileaks, are very well documented reasons as well.

Yes, let's not pretend the USG doesn't respect the rules of national and international law. I mean it's not like they say f... the law whenever it suits them, it's not like we could accuse them of torture, illegal renditions, pressuring foreign governments into discontinuing criminal investigations against American officials, distorting or plain ignoring international law, unlawful killings of foreign citizens, holding people for years without any regard for any laws whatsoever, illegally spying on American citizens.
Oh wait...

Not that surprising. The whole free market/neocon/neo-liberal agenda is an almost exact one on one match with the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy. I can already predict one of the outcomes of such a psychiatric evaluation: a significantly above average percentage of sociopathic tendencies. That's bad enough but most of us have had decades of sociopathic indoctrination in the form of exposure to this political ideology (Americans more so than others) so even people who do not have intrinsic sociopathic tendencies have internalized a lot of those "values" (or rather lack thereof) through socialization and incessant cultural reinforcement.

"Assange is a crook, plain and simple. I agree with your idealism but he's just using the public's emotions and exploiting them for a few million bucks. We used to say "wake up sheeple" but now we have become the lemmings in our blind fervor."

Got any facts to back up that totally baseless claim? Never mind answering that: no you don't.

I have no idea what happened between Assange and the Guardian. All there is is hearsay based on sources from the Guardian itself. Have there been tensions? Of course there've been friggin' tensions! They were sitting on one of the biggest friggin' leaks in the history of friggin' leaking from the most powerful empire on earth!

I for one will base my views of Assange on verifiable facts. Half the system is out to get him at the moment. The media is overflowing with political spin, a fact which anyone who has bothered to follow the story even a little is aware off.

I have seen Assange speak in various videos in which he appears smart, passionate and as a man with a mission. Many of the ideas, ideals, and objectives that people are ascribing to him are simply factually untrue. (Assange never said governments can't have secrets, that secrets are bad by definition, that everything should be leaked irrespective of consequences, etc.).

Would I like to sit around the table with him negotiating the terms of the publishing on of the biggest leaks in history? No idea, I wasn't there. I'm sure in many ways Assange is not the easiest individual to deal with. He wouldn't have gotten Wikileaks where it was if he had been. I have seen no convincing proof whatsoever for the majority the accusations that have been made against him. In fact many of those accusations are verifiably untrue.

I can't back it up but I have the feeling that in fact a big part for the reason why so many people seem to hate Assange's guts is that nobody is used to dealing with a man that is passionate about political ideals he truly believes in anymore. It's been a long time since we had any that got to to this level of public exposure and were as effective at achieving their goals. "If only he were a crook" people seem to be thinking, "then we would know how to pigeon hole him, understand him, be able to interpret his actions". People with strong ideals can be pretty fickle, unpredictable, and are not easily manipulated or shut up because the usual handles (power, greed etc.) aren't very effective against that kind of personality. Because of that they form a huge threat to the status quo. In a way this way of reacting shows how much our idea of "freedom" has become identical with the the liberal ideal of "negative freedom" and the belief that idealists/idealism are dangerous by definition.