By John Goss, Rafik Saley, and Okoth Osewe
As News Junkie Post went live about the deplorable record of Sweden’s Ambassador to Australia Sven-Olof Petersson as a proponent of rendition, a three-month old story about an event to commemorate the holocaust was resurrected in his defense.[i] Specifically, on September 5, Mr. Petersson related to a small contingent of Jews, Australians and Americans how Sweden, as a neutral country, had aided a World War II evacuation of refugees from Budapest under the auspices of Raoul Wallenberg.[ii] By ‘chance,’ Mr. Wallenberg’s business had shared the same premises as the United States Embassy. The speech underlined Petersson’s pride in this achievement by Sweden. On the other hand, he appears to have neglected to mention how a supposedly neutral Sweden had supplied the Nazi war machine with steel, or how Nazi gold had found its way into Swedish bank accounts and the alleged culpability of the Wallenbergs in these undertakings.[iii]
Petersson’s involvement in a rendition in 2001 that led to the torture of repatriated Egyptian refugees Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery marks a sharp and incongruous contrast against the story he told about how Wallenberg helped Hungarian Jewish refugees to safety. If you are rich, you can re-write history, and the Wallenberg family appears to be doing just this. This year, tributes to Raoul Wallenberg have been going up all over the world.
As part of his tribute to the holocaust victims, Petersson, together with the Israeli ambassador to Australia, planted trees on the University of Canberra campus: an act aimed at keeping the ‘we were persecuted’ industry perpetually aflame. Of course war and its victims should be remembered for a respectable period. Few would disagree with this. Yet there are many more recent wars and many more recent victims whom the world should remember: victims from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and all other current conflicts in the world. These wars have created total chaos in the buffer zones around Israel.
The most interesting facet of Petersson’s Wallenberg address is its timing. The lecture was presented in September. The trees were planted in September. Curiously, the article on the topic appeared in print two days after the News Junkie Post condemnation of Petersson’s support for rendition and torture. Sweden’s ambassador to Australia has shown a clear and unremitting determination to serve the US by delivering Julian Assange to the CIA. It is significant that the first Jewish article (note 2, below), which contains a link to Petersson’s speech, made no mention whatsoever of Assange, whereas the one published on December 21, and titled “Meet the Swedish Ambassador,” does.[iv]
Whether Petersson actually commented on Assange is difficult to know. The second article might even refer to an address Petersson made to another Jewish audience, since the address was simply qualified as being ‘recent’. Regardless of when or if the comment was ever made, it consists of the same stereotypical repetition that has come to be expected from certain news outlets, including the mainstream ones, regarding Assange and the Swedish judicial system.
Petersson emphasized that the Swedish judiciary is independent from the government, so he cannot make specific comments on the case. However, he did strongly address the defamation against the Swedish judicial system by followers of Assange, and he pointed out that despite suggestions otherwise, while Sweden has an extradition agreement with the US, it cannot extradite a person for a “political” or a “military” crime, and not for any other crime, if the person runs the risk of being executed. He also stated that the criminal charges raised in Sweden must be addressed in Sweden, as any Western country would demand.[v]
Petersson should know about Sweden having an extradition treaty with the US because he signed it on December 16, 2004 together with US Attorney General John Ashcroft and other permanent European representatives from Finland and Belgium. The purpose of the treaty was to help the US with its illegal war on terror. The argument about the judiciary and government being separate keeps being touted about, despite those with an ounce of intellect knowing it to have no basis in fact. As in every other country, the judiciary is paid for by the government; in actual fact it is paid for by the taxpayer, but the government is the entity that disburses the taxpayers’ money to the piper. Therefore the government gets to call the tune.
Who did the independent Swedish government call to its aid in its attempt to prosecute Julian Assange on allegations to which he has already answered questions in Sweden and been acquitted of any charge? It is the firm of Borgström & Bodström. How independent is Mr Bodström from Mr Petersson? Not at all independent. In fact Mr Bodström was foreign minister when Mr Petersson was minister of justice. Both were privy to the rendition of the aforementioned Egytian refugees, and both approved of the rendition that led to such abominable torture.[vi] How independent is Mr Borgström who is prosecuting this unbelievably flimsy case? He is friendly with Irmeli Krans, the police interrogator who now describes herself as a politician and who interviewed one of the women allegedly making allegations against Assange. This woman never signed the statement, and the interview went unrecorded. It is said Irmeli Krans allowed another woman who was allegedly making allegations, a friend of Krans, to sit in illegally on the interview. This is how independent the Swedish government is from its judiciary and police. Petersson knows all this. He cannot deny his own part in the rendition and torture of Egyptian refugees Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery, and others subsequently rendered, nor can Thomas Bodström deny his part in it.
Why is Petersson adamant that this questioning should take place in Sweden? It is hard not to suspect that a dirty clandestine deal has been done with the US: another of those deals that take place behind closed doors, like the one that got Jewish whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu locked up for 18 years. After serving this sentence, Vanunu was further detained under house arrest, and even now he is forbidden from leaving Israel. His ‘crime’ was the revelation that Israel had broken international law by having developed nuclear weapons. Following a tip-off from British quarters, the Israeli secret service Mossad picked up Vanunu in Rome in a ‘honey-trap.’ From there, he was flown to Israel. The rest is history.[vii] Vanunu had his freedom removed for telling the truth. This is almost certainly the basis of the secret agreement Petersson’s government struck with the US. It is essential to focus on this oft-repeated point, which although it is absolute nonsense, shows the determination of the Zionist-funded US government and its supporters to get Assange to Sweden.
Petersson also stated that the criminal charges raised in Sweden must be addressed in Sweden, as any Western country would demand.[viii] As well as this being blatantly untrue even with regard to Sweden, since Swedish prosecutors have on several occasions questioned people abroad on much more serious issues, there is a hint of something more sinister behind the determination. It does not take much brainpower to conclude that the CIA would pick up Julian Assange the moment he got off the plane and stepped foot onto the Stockholm tarmac. All the talk about Assange having questions to answer in Sweden is a red herring. Like Vanunu, Assange is another truth teller, a whistle blower, and therefore an enemy of those who make their livings from lies, deceit, war, rendition and torture.
Editor’s Notes: John Goss is a writer and researcher, United Kingdom; Rafik Saley is general secretary of the African Committee for Development in Stockholm, Sweden; Okoth Osewe is a journalist and author, he writes for Kenya Stockholm Blog. Photograph by Carolina Georgatou.
References
[ii] http://www.nswjbd.org/JBD-Perspectives/default.aspx
[iii] https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?6636-Why-Sweden-Why-Julian-Assange-Why-now&s=2cb205f7d6fda09357534b3e0c319a47 and http://schikelgruber.net/foracc.html
[iv] http://www.jwire.com.au/news/meet-the-swedish-ambassador/31222#more-31222
[v] ibid.
[vi] http://www.redress.org/CAT_2005_AgizavSweden.pdf (Paragraph 4.12)
[vii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu
[viii] http://www.jwire.com.au/news/meet-the-swedish-ambassador/31222#more-31222
About the Author
Julian Assange
You may well be interested in the leaking of the Kroll Report on the Moi family wealth and where it came from.
The curse.
Kenya lost a generation – 24 years – under the rule of the incompetent dictator of Kenya, arap Moi, who had torture chambers built in the centre of Nairobi . He ruined the country and stole public land everywhere he could. He stole all the money in the Central Bank. He brought Kenya to its knees.
He still has the nerve to open his mouth to advise Kenyans on what is good for them.
Julian Assange
The looting of Kenya under President Moi
From WikiLeaks
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/File:President_Daniel_arap_Moi.jpg >
President Daniel arap Moi, seen here walking through a guard of honnor
The breathtaking extent of corruption perpetrated by the family of the former Kenyan leader Daniel Arap Moi is revealed in a secret report which lays bare a web of shell companies, secret trusts and frontmen used to steal over two billion dollars worth of state money.
The suppressed U.K auditor’s report details how Kenyan state finances were laundered across the world to buy properties and companies in London , New York and South Africa and even a 10,000 hectare ranch in Australia .
The countries involved in the corrupt dealings include Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Canada, Finland, Germany, Grand Cayman, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jersey, Liechtenstein, Liberia, Luxembourg, Malawi, Namibia, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Russia, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Switzerland, the UAE, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States and Zaire.
The intricately detailed report, commissioned by President Kibaki after his 2002 election victory but later suppressed, forensically investigates corrupt transactions and holdings by several powerful members of the Kenyan elite.
The sums are comparable in magnitude to the looting of infamous kleptocrats such as Mobutu ( Zaire ), Marcos ( Philippines ), Abacha ( Nigeria ), Suharto ( Indonesia ) and Fujimori ( Peru ). The leaked material is extremely politically sensitive. Ex-President Moi has become a key player in political life in Kenya , and is now an essential pillar in President Kibaki’s campaign for re-election in
Assange urges leak of US drone rules
Posted by AFP on February 9, 2013
The Obama administration called strikes legal, ethical and “wise,”/AFP-File
LOS ANGELES, Feb 9 – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange urged US officials on Friday to leak secret documents on drone strikes, saying that the broad discretion to kill citizens showed a “collapse” in the American system.
Assange, who has angered US officials by releasing thousands of secret memos, used a rare US television appearance to condemn President Barack Obama’s controversial green light to kill American citizens who conspire with Al-Qaeda.
“I can’t see a greater collapse when the executive can kill its own citizens arbitrarily, at will, in secret, without any of the decision-making becoming public,” Assange told the HBO talk show “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
“That’s why we need organizations like WikiLeaks. I encourage anyone in the White House who has access to those rules and procedures, work them on over to us. We’ll keep you secret and reveal it to the public.”
Assange spoke to host Bill Maher, a supporter of WikiLeaks, by video link from Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he has been holed up since June to avoid extradition to Sweden. Britain has refused him safe passage to Ecuador.
Swedish authorities say they want to question Assange over allegations of sex crimes. The former computer hacker says he fears Sweden will extradite him to the United States over WikiLeaks’s massive release of sensitive documents.
Bradley Manning, a young army intelligence analyst in Iraq, was arrested in May 2010 over suspicions he handed diplomatic correspondence and other data to the website. He faces life in prison if convicted by a military tribunal.
NBC News published an unclassified document by the Justice Department this week indicating that senior Al-Qaeda operators may be lawfully killed, even if they are US citizens and are not shown to be actively plotting an attack.
The Obama administration called strikes legal, ethical and “wise,” and vowed to provide lawmakers with access to secret documents that outline the legal justifications for drone strikes.
Human rights groups voiced outrage in September 2011 when a US drone strike in Yemen killed radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, editor of an Al-Qaeda magazine. Both were US citizens who had never been charged with a crime.
For the first time, 25-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has admitted to being the source behind the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history. More than a thousand days after he was arrested, Manning testified Thursday before a military court. He said he leaked the classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in order to show the American public the “true costs of war.” Reading for more than an hour from a 35-page statement, Manning said: “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” At the pretrial hearing at Fort Meade military base in Maryland, Manning pleaded guilty to reduced charges on 10 counts, which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. But even if the judge accepts the plea, prosecutors can still pursue a court-martial on the remaining 12 charges. The most serious of those is “aiding the enemy” and carries a possible life sentence. We are joined by Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a lawyer to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He just returned from attending Manning’s hearing. [includes rush transcript]
Assange sex crimes accuser fires her lawyer
Published: 28 Mar 13
One of the two women in the Swedish Assange case has dropped her high-profile lawyer, reportedly for speaking too much to the press.
Australian media reported on Thursday that the woman was not happy with how her lawyer Claes Borgström had handled the case when speaking with the media.
While her application to a Swedish court to change lawyer is not available to the public, Borgström addressed the report in a statement.
“It has been impossible to avoid contact with the media in this case. When I have been in contact with the media it has been with the approval of my client, sometimes she has asked me to do so,” he wrote.
Borgström, Sweden’s former equality ombudsman (Jämställdhetsombudsmannen), is no stranger to taking on controversial cases.
His former client has reportedly asked that lawyer Elisabeth Massi Fritz take over.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden over allegations of rape and sexual assault. He fought extradition to Sweden, from which he fears extradition to the US, in the British court system.
His appeals were struck down. Assange is currently residing at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which local police cannot enter.
In Sweden, meanwhile, Borgström said the sheer size of media coverage of the case made it even more important for his client to feel comfortable with her legal representative.
“In any sexual offence case it is particularly important that the plaintiff feels confident in the lawyer representing her,” he wrote in a statement.
“This is even more true when we take into consideration the attention this case has attracted.”
Australian media reports also said that chief prosecutor Marianne Ny had quit the case, which was declined by the country’s Prosecution Authority (Åklagarmyndigheten) on Thursday when contacted by Swedish press.
“Ny still heads the investigation and is responsible for the case,” spokeswoman Britta von Schoultz told the Expressen newspaper.
TT/The Local
Israel opens ‘de facto jail’ for migrants
450 African asylum seekers moved to new detention centre, where they will be held indefinitely without charge.
Last updated: 12 Dec 2013 17:19
Israel has begun moving African asylum seekers into a new detention facility in the country’s southern desert, in a move that has been harshly criticised by human rights groups.
The Israeli prison service said 480 African asylum seekers, who had been held in Shaharonim detention centre, were transferred to the new facility on Thursday, and about 1,000 asylum seekers would be held there by the end of the month.
An amendment to Israel’s “Anti-Infiltration Law” was passed by parliament, the Knesset, on Tuesday, and shortened the mandatory prison terms for African asylum seekers who have illegally entered Israel from three years to one year.
The Israeli government said the law “creates a suitable balance between the right of the State of Israel to defend its borders and prevent infiltration, and its obligation to act in a humanitarian manner toward anyone within its borders and protect the human rights due to every person”.
But the asylum seekers will now be held in the new detention centre, known as Sadot, indefinitely without charge or trial until they can be sent back to their home countries.
The detention of African asylum seekers, a group of Israeli human rights groups said in a statement on Tuesday, “is not only draconian, undemocratic, and a fatal blow to human rights, it will also do nothing to help the already marginalized residents of South Tel Aviv”, an area where many asylum seekers live.
In the new facility, asylum seekers will be locked down at night, and forced to check-in with the Israeli authorities three times per day. They will also be barred from working outside the centre.
Human rights groups have called the new facility a de facto prison, a charge that Israel denies.
Speaking to Al Jazeera in November, before the law was officially approved, Marc Grey, spokesperson for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said: “We don’t see this as an improvement… The law itself, whether it’s three years or one year [of detention]… it’s still just absolutely a massive violation of [asylum seekers’] rights.”
9,000-person capacity
There are an estimated 54,000 African asylum seekers in Israel, with most coming from Sudan and Eritrea.
The Israeli government says African migrants are a burden on the state, and threaten its Jewish character. The country’s policies, state officials have said, aim to deter the arrival of refugees at Israel’s borders, and deport the ones that already live in the country.
According to a report in Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the new detention facility can currently hold up to 1,000 people, but it is expected to expand to accommodate 3,300 within the next two months.
“We hope it will eventually hold 6,000 or even 9,000 people,” Yitzhak Aharonovitch, Israel’s Public Security Minister, said.
The state said it would also provide African migrants held in the new centre with a monthly stipend, health services and educational training.
But asylum seekers are not convinced.
“There is no-one that can claim that he or she is safe in Israel… Everybody is afraid here. We are not secure,” Haile Mengistaab, the head of the Eritrean Community Committee in Israel, told Al Jazeera in November.
Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/12/israel-opens-de-facto-jail-new-migrants-20131212151442533202.html
Israel to pay African asylum-seekers $3,500 to leave voluntarily
Cabinet also backs bill to detain Africans in ‘open’ Negev facility.
By Ilan Lior | Nov. 25, 2013 | 10:11 AM | 12
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted unanimously on Sunday to allocate NIS 440 million to deal with African asylum-seekers in the coming year, with most of the money going toward a new detention center in the Negev. The ministers likewise voted as one to support a bill coming to the Knesset on Tuesday that would effectively keep the illegal migrants inside the detention center around the clock, even though it is billed as an “open” facility.
Most of the money approved will go to defray the cost of establishing and operating the Negev center, but some will also be spent on “increasing the personal safety” in south Tel Aviv, where many African migrants live. Some 550 new positions have been created to implement the program in the Public Security Ministry, the Population and Immigration Authority and the Economy Ministry.
The cabinet also approved a proposal by Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar, supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to raise from $1,500 to $3,500 the grant given to African migrants who agree to leave the country.
“We are determined to remove the tens of thousands of infiltrators who are here, after we lowered to zero the number of work-seeking infiltrators who have entered Israel’s cities,” Netanyahu said at the cabinet meeting. He said the measures the cabinet passed on Sunday were “proportionate and essential to protect the Jewish and democratic character of the state, and will restore security to Israel’s citizens, while maintaining the directives of the High Court and international law.”
The plan includes beefing up the police presence in south Tel Aviv, though not in other areas where a large number of African asylum-seekers live. Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonvitch said the 130 more police called for by the plan would “significantly increase enforcement and help improved personal security and enforcement [against] crime in the area.”
All migrants must report to facility
The new amendment, which Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar is to present for its first Knesset vote on Tuesday, has been harshly criticized by human rights groups and the opposition.
The amendment cuts from three years to one the term of detention without trial for African migrants who enter the country illegally. It also establishes a new detention center, which will be closed only at night. The amendment states that newly arrived illegal migrants, as well as those already in Israel, must report to the center. They will not be allowed to work and they will be required to report there for roll call three times a day. Migrants who breach the conditions of residence in the new facility, can be sent to an officially closed facility. The state pledges to provide food, a bed, and health and welfare services at the new facility, according to the amendments.
The chairwoman of the Knesset Committee on Migrants, MK Michal Rozin, said MKs do not know what they will be voting on. “We can’t understand who will live in the facility, … what sanitation conditions they will have, what welfare conditions or how much money the state intends to spend on each of these issues.” Rozin said the Knesset should not pass a law in the short span of two weeks that is so significant for the lives of tens of thousands of people, and so costly, without knowing the answers to these and other questions.
MK Dov Khenin (Hadash) said the new facility would not only infringe on the rights of the migrants, it would cost millions of shekels that will be taken from the funding of social programs. “Bottom line, even if they lock up 3,000 people in the new facility, what about the 50,000 who are now in the streets of south Tel Aviv and other poor areas?” he asked.
Khenin said the government’s policy had to be reversed. “It’s time for an entirely new direction. To start treating the people who come from Africa seeking life as people, and as long as they cannot be returned to their countries of origin, to allow them to work in israel instead of the foreign workers whom the state continues to bring in every year,” Khenin maintained.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/1.559988