Islamophobia appears to have become the religion of British Home Secretary Theresa May, who follows the US’ racist lead in its war on Islam, referred to in the invented vernacular as the “war on terror.” Mrs. May is obsessed with Mr. Abu Qatada principally because he worships at a mosque instead of an Anglican Church, yet the religion she claims to practice is Christianity, which teaches, among other virtues: love, forgiveness and reform.

Consider the following two “criminals”:

Abu Qatada

Let us assume for a moment that Abu Qatada has committed crimes in Jordan, though much evidence suggests otherwise. Mr. Qatada has committed no crime in the United Kingdom. So, even if he was a criminal abroad, he fits the Christian example of a reformed character and, providing he continues to live lawfully, should be forgiven. What appears to irritate Mrs. May as much as anything is that Mr. Qatada has called for the release of Muslims held in United States prisons and Guantanamo Bay, which gets him labeled a preacher of hatred. Most of the prisoners for whom he advocates have been held for 11 years without charge, never mind without trial. I too, together with many others in the UK, have called for the release of these prisoners. So why have I not been arrested? I would suggest that what makes my case different is that I am a white Christian and consequently fall outside of Mrs. May’s racist profile.

Abu Qatada is a family man. His family has been subjected to racist abuse from right-wing extremists, but his children are model pupils, and his family is respected elsewhere. When they were abused, due largely to a media campaign against Qatada, no authorities intervened to protect them. The family suffered silently for a long time before getting an injunction to stop the abuse. All this has resulted from slanderous accusations made in support of the war on Islam by previous governments and, more recently and fervently, by Theresa May in pushing forward her fixation to send Abu Qatada to Jordan to face trial. Jordan is reputed for torture, and Mr. Qatada belonged to an opposition party before the present dictatorship; he also has no great excess of money.

Now if Qatada were as wealthy as a United Arab Emirates’ oil-sheikh, the racism against him would probably be kept in check. The nipple through which money flows is the one at which the authorities suck, and while the cash keeps flowing in, it matters little whether the breast is black, brown or white. Thus criminal oligarchs from Russia, former Soviet states and elsewhere, may bring their filthy lucre to the UK and get it washed free from stains at the laundry of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. The world’s mafia can afford to buy off accusations of wrongdoing, and Mrs. May, being married to a banker, can only empathize. The divide is not about rich and poor, so much as the gaping crevice between a white alleged criminal settler such as Shaun Patrick Breach and a Palestinian like Abu Qatada — who is derogatorily called a radical Islamic cleric. It is also about how differently the Home Secretary and her authorities treat each man.

Shaun Patrick Breach

It is hard not to go looking in the Dictionary of Abusive Slang to find a fitting epithet to describe Shaun Patrick Breach with any degree of accuracy. Before coming to the UK from South Africa, Breach had allegedly been a mercenary for the notorious Executive Outcomes, though this is denied by the former controllers of this corporation. Before its demise, Executive Outcomes had at its helm right-wing fixers like Tony Buckingham, Simon Mann and Tim Spicer, whose former antics in Africa and, in the case of Buckingham and Spicer, current ones in oil-rich countries destabilized by NATO, were sketched in a recent article. Breach is different altogether. While most of the top men have kept their nefarious activities under cover, Breach seems to wallow in his crimes, and he appears to be, or thinks himself as being, untouchable.

Shaun Patrick Breach is an alleged serial wife-beater. He has been accused of trying to knife journalist Simon Tomlin, who was and might still be investigating his activities. Despite repeated requests, and despite the attack on Tomlin being monitored by CCTV cameras, the Nottinghamshire police has refused to stop and search Breach for weapons. He appears to be able to commit crimes with impunity, provoking the question: why? What information does Breach hold to render him above the law? He lives in Nottingham, a place that some might describe as England’s equivalent to the Chicago of the 1930s. Nottingham is reputed to be a gangster-ridden, drug-running, gun-toting place, with some of the police allegedly being in cahoots with the gangsters. What is even more astounding is that many of the locals seem to know who the bent coppers are.

Despite being arrested in the UK more than 40 times for crimes ranging from witness intimidation to death-threats — including racist attacks — Breach has usually been released without charge and never been imprisoned. Simon Tomlin believes that Breach has been protected by the police and security services as a useful asset. This could be right, since no mainstream journalist has covered this story of police cover up, and if Shaun Patrick Breach is an asset, the mainstream media would not be allowed to go public with this information. Thus Simon Tomlin seems to be taking on Nottinghamshire police almost single handedly, and recordings suggest that Tomlin’s account of Breach’s psychotic knife attack is correct. So what is an alleged South African criminal with British Nationalist Party leanings doing in the UK, given Theresa May’s policy of returning suspected criminals to their homelands, or to countries where they are wanted for allegedly breaking the law?

One cannot help but conclude that Theresa May is racist. She has targeted Abu Qatada, who has committed no crime in the UK, but not Shaun Patrick Breach, who has probably committed many. Breach was protected by the law and police, whereas Qatada and his family were not. There is no evidence that Qatada has been anything but a good family man; by contrast, Breach has been accused of beating all three wives he has had, and other women too. Why doesn’t the Home Secretary do Breach’s current wife a favor and send the self-acclaimed mercenary back to South Africa, and stop picking on Qatada? Of course the above interpretation of what has been seen and read could be wrong. If so, perhaps Mrs. May could explain how these allegations are false.

Editor’s Note: All photographs by UK Home Office.

Michael Diamond was a general practice lawyer in Union County, New Jersey, before a brief career change in 1981 when the newly-created Division of Water Resources in the  New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) was looking for an Enforcement Administrator and Chief Regulatory Officer. Diamond accepted the position and was effective at applying his legal skills to create new enforcement techniques for the department. Having received no formal training from the DEP or its overseers at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Diamond realized that he was surrounded by other lawyers and engineers but no scientists or health officials. He began to ask why there were no microbiologists, botanists and professional health people there to study the connection between environmental exposure and illness. After a year, Diamond was cycled out of the position and returned to his law practice. This time, he applied what he had learned at the NJDEP to his law studies and began looking for a remedy that would bring Americans back to health and sustainability to the Earth. On study of the Constitution of the United States, he realized that the wording of The Domestic Violence Clause, in Article IV, Section 4, could apply to environmental issues. Diamond has written several essays and a book titled If You Can Keep It: A Constitutional Roadmap to Environmental Security on the topic of this overlooked constitutional clause. I had the privilege of meeting Michael Diamond last year and learned about his crusade firsthand. We recently sat down together for an interview.

Andrea Egizi: Why do you think the EPA and DEP did not hire health professionals to research the effects of the environment on the very people they were trying to protect? How could they have made decisions about risks, let’s say concerning pollutants in potable water from a well?

Michael Diamond: Exactly. The closest they came to assessing risk was to search the published literature and determine whether any of the contaminants caused cancer.

A.E. And you found that disquieting because…?

M.D. Because there are an array of illnesses caused by exposures that don’t lead to cancer but are nevertheless damaging. And to make matters worse, the engineers were unable to assess the amount of exposure that might be harmful to children.

A.E. So, it’s fair to say that they were flying blind?

M.D. Without question. But don’t get me wrong, the engineers were wonderful, hard working people. It was just that the system had been set up to overlook the real health effects of exposures in the country. And the system wasn’t just wrong, it was Kafkaesque. The engineers would say that certain chemicals were okay to be in the drinking water because they were not carcinogenic; they were only mutagenic.

A.E. Stop me if I’m wrong, but if a chemical is mutagenic, doesn’t that mean that it’s dangerous in that it creates mutations that can be harmful?

M.D. Absolutely. Exposures to a mutagenic chemical can create birth defects, damage DNA, and end up causing cancer. But there’s something even more troubling about reliance being principally on published scientific journals to determine whether a particular exposure caused cancer or not. The scientific journals themselves were and remain biased in favor of the producers and users of chemicals. You see, scientific research, to the delight of the corporations, requires that each contaminant be shown, by itself, to cause cancer. And environmental laws in the United States have codified that requirement. In effect, chemicals have been treated as though they are individuals presumed to be innocent unless and until proven guilty by rigorous scientific research.

A.E. Now, that doesn’t accord with reality because…?

M.D. Chemicals are never experienced by people individually. There are multitudes of them within all of us. We’ve been inundated by exposures since the mid 1940s. In fact, chemicals interact with one another, and that interaction can and does augment the harms that they do to us. In addition, each of us is unique. What may be insignificant to one person can be a tipping point into disease for another. To treat chemicals as innocent until proven guilty, as if they were individuals with due process rights is wrong and dangerous. And the worst part is that children are so very vulnerable. If there had been even one microbiologist present, he or she certainly would have been able to express the truth that exposures during critical developmental times, even though slight, should have been considered harmful and dangerous. A minute exposure in utero, for example, could easily cripple a developing immune system. And a similar minute exposure at a critical juncture in the development of a young growing brain could readily condemn a child to difficulties in learning and impulse control.

A.E. But certainly, in the 30 years that have passed, hasn’t the environmental regulatory system caught up to the reality of current environmental threats?

M.D. In a word: No. Researchers, for example, in a futile effort to find the alleged single cause of autism, remain stuck in the stupid maze created by our environmental laws. They’re not likely to find one single cause for the disease because the causes are multiple, interacting, and may be occurring in a flash of tiny exposures during a particularly susceptible span of moments in a child’s early development. Autism used to occur once in some ten thousand births. Now, in some states, it’s occurring once in less than every forty births.

A.E. And other diseases?

M.D. Cancer used to be rare in adults and even rarer in children. Now, it’s showing up in roughly half of the American population. And cancer in children is now so common that there are pediatric oncology units in major hospitals. Babies, eighteen months of age, are being diagnosed with brain tumors. But cancer and autism are not the only rising diseases. Asthma is showing exponential growth, and food allergies are threatening children’s lives in a manner that has never happened before. At present, schools have to be prepared to administer a life-saving antidote when an allergic child is exposed to peanut butter.

A.E. Talking about children, I can’t help thinking about whether we’re leaving to them a world that will not be sustainable.

M.D. Yes, I’m with you there. Global climate changes are real and observable. Acidification is undermining food chains in the oceans, and that’s occurring as we speak. Unless we get to changing things fast, this planet will begin a cycle downward toward being uninhabitable. Wars for declining resources have already begun and are destabilizing large populations.

A.E. So tell me, what solution do you think will work?

M.D. When I left the state environmental department, I began searching for a remedy that would bring Americans back to health and bring sustainability to the Earth. One of the documents that I studied was the Constitution of the United States. I studied the Constitution in law school, but that clause was never mentioned. Most lawyers never heard of it. There hasn’t been a major legal case on that provision for over a hundred years. So, it doesn’t make its way into case-oriented legal textbooks. But when I started to look at that provision, I realized that it was the ideal remedy for us because the Supreme Court has repeatedly held it to be a people’s clause. All this meaning that if and when we ever get to the point where we are harming ourselves and each other in significant ways that are beyond the police powers of the states to handle, then it’s the responsibility of the federal government to step in.

A.E. How is it that American industry was allowed to conduct a massive chemical assault upon us and our children with outrageous consequences?

M.D. The year 1945 should have been the beginning of a better life for everyone on this Earth. Instead, on the death of Roosevelt, his then Vice President was Harry Truman. Truman, instead of respecting the Russian war effort that was the prime reason for the military defeat of Hitler’s Germany, declared America’s undying opposition to communism and demanded its defeat whenever and wherever it surfaced in the world. Thus began the Cold War in which Truman tapped the American business community to be our avatars in the fight to bring goods and services to a world in need. Our manufacturing know how and technical competency were to bring an end to poverty and ignorance. And by doing that, Truman believed, we would bring an end to what he described as Godless and evil communism, forever. Now, relating this to the environment, neither Truman, nor the presidents to follow him had a mindset to regulate industry. Industry was our newly knighted warrior. Manufacturing was going to enrich, not bring harm, to the world. And that was the mindset that kept the American government from doing what governments were supposed to do: protect the people from harms, both internal and external.

A.E. Corporate power at this time must, in fact, be confronted in order to assure survival. Is that what you are saying?

M.D. Exactly, and the person who said it best a long time ago was Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis. In a 1933 case, Liggett v. Lee, he said that it had been a mistake to give corporations the rights of citizens. They were anything but citizens. Their sole purpose was to bring financial returns to shareholders. In the process of accomplishing that, they would limit freedoms and diminish human happiness. Brandeis called them “Frankenstein monsters.”

A.E. How could the domestic violence clause limit corporate power?

M.D. The domestic violence clause contains war powers. Let me repeat. That provision contains war powers to be used in peacetime to assure our survival. War powers can be used to revoke and revise corporate rights and prerogatives. The domestic violence clause, because it entails war powers, can require that corporations abide by strict requirements that are necessary in an emergency.

A.E. An example?

M.D. Certainly. It didn’t matter if you were the biggest automobile company in the world in 1944. The American government at war directed you to make trucks and tanks, and that’s what you did. Every corporation in the United States was commandeered. Indeed, the entire economy was commandeered by the federal government under emergency war making powers in the Constitution until there was victory. The domestic violence clause entails the same powers.

A.E. Alright, so what could the federal government do now, using the powers of the domestic violence clause, to safeguard people?

M.D. All of the things that must be done to assure our survival. Expenditures for war must end. All of our resources must be used to heal the sick and stop the exposures. Agriculture has to be made organic, with crops coming from family farms again, instead of from feedlots and corporate monocultures. Our healthcare system would be commandeered to change the focus to preventive actions and intensive work with those of us who have been affected by exposures. Insurance companies will need to be taken out of healthcare and their personnel be trained and put to work elsewhere in a new health-delivery system. The stranglehold that pharmaceutical companies now have on health choices will be stopped and broken. Enormous efforts will need to be put into education so that our children are no longer burdened by the consequences of exposures and can get back to performance levels preceding the 1970s. That’s just a small glimpse of what can be done.

A.E. So how could this clause be put into action?

M.D. We create a movement and a new political party, if necessary, by telling Americans who are suffering from diseases and disabilities as never before that their plight and the plight of their children and grandchildren is not a matter of bad luck, bad genes, or God’s will. Our ill health is the result of harms we have brought down upon ourselves, beginning with the chemical age that we created at the end of the Second World War.

E.A. And Americans will listen to this message?

M.D. As never before. That’s the one benefit to experiencing a total defeat. Corporate America has overplayed its hand. Not satisfied with efforts to own all seeds through genetic engineering, they are now producing genetically modified fish. People are beginning to think of that nasty experiment as Frankenfish, a product conceived and made by Justice Brandeis’s Frankenstein monsters. In short, Americans are health conscious and are ready to hear that we’ve been duped. Americans understand now, as never before, that all of our institution, from financial, through business and manufacturing, need to be reconfigured to serve the needs of the people and not just those whose purpose in life is to engorge themselves with power and money.

E.A. So a political effort begins how?

M.D. By contacting our state government representatives, members of the fifty state legislatures. Families suffering from cancer, asthma, autism, and the host of learning and attention deficits need to contact those representatives and do it regularly. The state legislators should be asked to tell the federal government that a condition of domestic violence exists in all of our states and it requires the federal government to bring us back to health and assure our survival.

E.A. And, as I understand your essays, you have a special job for our elders, do you not?

M.D. Yes. Those of us who were born before 1940 remember a time when cancer was rare and no one knew anyone who suffered from autism. Learning was easier then, and civility was the rule. I think we ought to call upon those of us who were born back then to testify as witnesses that the modern diseases and disabilities were brought about as a result of trading health for corporate profits.

A.E. Well, I get the sense that what you’re saying can happen.

M.D. I’d say it’s worth a try? Andrea, thanks so very much for listening to all of this. I so very much appreciate your attitude of respect for new ideas.

Editor’s Note: All composite photographs  by Mark Rain.

By John Goss, Rafik Saley and Okoth Osowe

When the complicity of Sweden’s Ambassador to Australia Sven-Olof Petersson in illegal rendition and torture, plus Sweden’s obsequiousness towards CIA demands of extraordinary rendition, were exposed in News Junkie Post in December 2012, it seemed unthinkable that the Australian government would knowingly entertain an ambassador of such questionable credentials. Australia’s Foreign Minister and Senator Bob Carr had joined in the chorus when Sven Olof Petersson, instructed Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, to go to Sweden. We wrote to Senator Carr to inform him of our findings about Ambassador Petersson.

For the attention of Senator the Hon Bob Carr, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Parliament of Australia
cc Clive Stafford Smith, human rights’ lawyer
cc Paul Stephens, Australian Ambassador to Sweden

Dear Senator the Hon Bob Carr,

They say people are judged by the company they keep. In December last year the following article was published regarding former activities of Sweden’s Ambassador to Australia, Sven-Olof Petersson.

http://newsjunkiepost.com/2012/12/19/how-sweden-collaborated-with-cia-on-renditions-and-framing-of-assange/

In the light of revelations that Sven-Olof Petersson was complicit in the rendition of several refugees, including Egyptian nationals Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery, who were picked up by the CIA and severely tortured in Egypt, will you Mr Carr disassociate yourself from the Swedish ambassador’s persecution of Julian Assange? Both you and Mr Petersson have urged Assange to go to Sweden in an expression that he would be treated fairly, whereas many suspect the Wikileaks founder would be picked up by the CIA as soon as he stepped foot in Sweden.

Julian Assange has had to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy because the Australian Embassy and Australian government have refused him sanctuary even though he is an Australian citizen. In what increasingly looks like a trumped-up case, in which the prosecuting firm in Sweden, of Borgström & Bodström, has been specifically chosen by the Swedish government to press charges on the flimsiest of allegations, allegations of which Assange has already been acquitted without charge, is it not an uncomfortable position in which you find yourself?

We would point out that Thomas Bodström was Minister for Justice in Sweden, when Sven-Olof Petersson was Director General at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Both knew of and approved of the rendition of Mr Agiza and Mr al-Zery. We do not want to believe that you share these values too.

People are judged by the company they keep. So we respectfully ask if you will disassociate yourself from Mr Petersson and question his suitability as an ambassador to Australia and other Australasian countries? Please also pledge that Australia will start giving Julian Assange the support he is entitled to as an Australian citizen. We await your response.

John Goss, B Soc Sc (International Studies plus Hons),
Rafik Saley, General Secretary – African Committee For Development – Sweden
Okoth Osowe, Author and Journalist – Sweden

We posed three questions in all (highlighted here in bold type). The first and third questions are similar except that the latter asks additionally if Senator Carr will question Mr Petersson’s suitability as an ambassador. Does the following reply from Carr’s office address any of our questions?

Dear Mr Goss

Thank you for your letter dated 13 January 2013 regarding the case of Mr Julian Assange. I have been asked to reply on behalf of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator the Hon Bob Carr.

The matters you have raised in regard to the Swedish legal system and the Swedish Ambassador to Australia would be more appropriately raised with Swedish authorities.

The Australian Government continues to offer Mr Assange consular assistance and our officials have been in regular contact with him or his representatives since legal processes were initiated in 2010. The Government is monitoring legal developments in both the UK and Sweden to ensure that due process is followed.

Thank you for bringing your views to the attention of the Minister.

Yours sincerely,

Claire McCormish
Acting Assistant Secretary
Consular Operations Branch

It is commonplace for politicians to avoid questions; but this letter is especially abstruse in that it only addresses the support which it claims the Australian government has been offering to Julian Assange. Christine Assange does not believe that her son has been getting appropriate consular support. In August 2012, she told Samaya Chanthaphavong that:

“Julian has had no consular assistance whatsoever since 2010. All the government has done is to book seats at hearings and collect evidence and scurry back to whoever. We know that a lot of evidence has been sent back to the US in regards to Wikileaks. They don’t acknowledge Julian’s presence in the courtroom, they do not offer any assistance, they do not offer advice or feedback.”[1]

The letter from Senator Carr’s office bears out the claims made by Christine Assange. Perhaps Carr thinks he has answered our letter. Perhaps he genuinely believes that Julian Assange has had consular support. If this is the case, then we would respectfully question what he smokes. Mr Carr has joined a known supporter of torture and rendition in urging Julian Assange to go to Sweden. This is the kind of support being offered by the Australian Foreign Office and Government.

The reply to our letter answers none of the three questions asked. It is like going into a greengrocer’s, asking for three cabbages, and being thrown a coconut. What we really wanted to know from Australia was whether Bob Carr would disassociate himself from the Swedish ambassador because of his track-record on extradition and torture. If Senator Carr was prepared to disassociate himself from Ambassador Sven-Olof Petersson, would he not have said so? We are forced to assume that he agrees with rendition and torture and the handing over of innocent subjects to the CIA.

Sweden’s record speaks for itself. It allowed, and the government probably even sanctioned, the recent rendition of two Swedes of Somalian extraction, Ali Yasin Ahmed and Mohamed Yusuf, who were picked up in Djibouti and rendered by the United States together with a British subject also of Somalian extraction.[2] The British man, Mahdi Hashi, was stripped of his British citizenship for alleged terrorist activity, even though he had not been tried.[3] Where was Mr Hashi after his disappearance from England? Was he interrogated aboard a US navy vessel.[4] Theresa May’s racist anti-Islamist actions are well documented.

Senator Carr has shown little sympathy for his fellow-countryman and Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. On the other hand he has been happy to entertain and encourage the Swedish ambassador with whom he planted a mixture of pines and maples on the campus of Canberra University in November 2012.[5] At this event, he unveiled a plaque in memory of Raoul Wallenberg. Ironically he used an epithet ascribed to Edmund Burke, which incidentally Burke never actually said or wrote, but many think he did:

“All that is required for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.”

In response to our request, Senator Carr, who may well be a good man for all we know, chose to do nothing.

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. Photographs two, three, four, five, six and seven by Takver and photograph one by John Blower.

References

1. http://rightnow.org.au/topics/asylum-seekers/interview-with-christine-assange/
2. http://www.thelocal.se/45252/20121224 and http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/01/02/obamas-embrace-of-rendition-the-appearance-of-three-men-with-somali-roots-in-federal-court/
3. http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/12/22/missing-british-somali-man-reappears-in-new-york-court/
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/world/africa/07detain.html?_r=1
5. http://newsjunkiepost.com/2012/12/27/is-a-zionist-connection-at-play-to-frame-wikileaks-assange-in-sweden/ and http://www.jwire.com.au/news/wallenberg-memorialised/30208

What has the US military done to Shaker Aamer? Have they tortured him so badly they dare not release him in case he discloses the nature of these abuses? Shaker (pronounced Shacker) is a sick man. Why is he the only British subject still in Guantanamo Bay concentration camp? Clearly he has not committed any crime or he would have been brought to trial. At least that is how justice used to be done in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

Shaker has a family in England, including a 10-year old son he has never seen. Imagine being deprived of seeing your newborn son over the first ten years of his life. Imagine missing the first step taken, the first word spoken, the first milk-tooth, the first picture drawn, the first sentence read, the first school, the first school uniform, the first flapping stroke in the swimming pool, the first stroke with a cricket bat and all the other firsts in the life of a father’s pride and joy. That, among loss of freedom, loss of earnings potential, loss of comfort from loved ones, and a whole host of other losses, is what joint British and US intelligence and the legal system have taken from Shaker. In depriving Shaker himself of his freedom, they have deprived his family of the love of a father and husband.

Shaker is a victim. He is a victim of the George W. Bush/Tony Blair war on Islam, otherwise described as the “War on Terror.” For background reasons, let us take a brief look at the factors that led to the arrest and detention of so many innocent people. Most English and American people still refuse to think that the US and Israel could have been involved in 9/11. Quite rightly, no reasonable person wants to believe that their country could kill its own citizens simply to create a new enemy. It is almost unthinkable.

Nevertheless, directly after 9/11 came the anthrax letters: letters sent to several news desks and to two politicians who had spoken out against the war on Iraq. These letters were opened by staff, killing five and infecting 17 people. The strain (Ames) of anthrax was a US strain, and eventually Dr Bruce E. Ivins, a bio-weapons researcher from the US Army Research Medical Institute into Infectious Diseases, was said to have been the lone anthrax letter sender, following his death in 2008. The alleged suicide came just before Ivins was to be arrested for the crime. If others were involved, they will never be found or prosecuted.

One of the really negative results of 9/11, from a human-rights viewpoint, was that it enabled George W. Bush to create a new enemy, since the old enemy of the cold war years, the Soviet Union, no longer existed. Why is having a foreign enemy so important? It might sound a bit preposterous for governments to create an enemy deliberately, but in actual fact this engenders an atmosphere among the populace whereby everyone can rally round in opposition to a common target. It helps take people’s minds off domestic problems. It also allows for changes in law that might not otherwise be possible. After Bush’s announcement of a war on terror, new legislation gave authorities the power to arrest terror suspects and hold them indefinitely without charge or trial, just for suspicion. For more than a decade now, the US and UK have been in a state of perpetual war. This means that proper laws that operate in peacetime and are generally more amenable, reasonable and just to society at large, can be, and are being, ignored, while ultra-harsh wartime measures are in place to everybody’s detriment, except those who would create an enemy that did not previously exist. Thus a basic legal tenet of advanced countries everywhere, habeas corpus, appears to be dead in its grave.

Even worse now, fiction is imitating reality. Hollywood is making films like Zero Dark Thirty (released January 11) that attempt to justify the torture and imprisonment at Guantanamo. It fabricates claims that Osama Bin Laden was captured and shot because a Muslim, Ammar, was tortured. This film serves to perpetuate the myth that Muslims are our enemies. No creditable information is ever obtained by torture. Torture is just a tool of sadists who never had any love in their lives and are incapable of showing love or compassion towards others. Hollywood, as a movie-maker, needs to be flushed down the pan. Another film, Collateral Murder, from Spielberg’s studio DreamWorks and scheduled for release in November, appears to have the sole purpose of discrediting Julian Assange.

What has happened to American justice? The United States has regressed to the days of race hate, except the hate is no longer leveled at blacks but at Muslims. Muslims of any nationality are the target of this more recent hate campaign initiated by George W. Bush and continued by his successor. Unfortunately, even though Uncle Sam has a black president, white supremacy still governs the land of the free. Blacks in the United States fought racism under the leadership of the great martyr and orator, Martin Luther King, and gradually earned some basic human rights, becoming, not the enemy, not second-class citizens unworthy of sitting on the same bus or going to the same schools as whites, but fellow human beings and an integral part of the society. Thanks to the tolerance that replaced the bigotry of former years, the US was able to elect a black president – something that would have been unthinkable fifty years earlier. It should never be forgotten that before the US liberated itself, certain individuals were called “colored” and more derogatory names, and deprived of equal rights.

Shaker Aamer has been cleared for release, yet he remains incarcerated in a Guantanamo cell without a view to the outside world. Like US outposts for extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay is on foreign soil. Being on foreign soil enables US military personnel to engage in all kinds of degrading, humiliating and inhuman treatment of individuals because the prisoners are Muslims, and the US has decided to make an enemy out of Islam. Like the Mafia in the last recession, the US government considers itself to be untouchable. Two petitions have been created by supporters of Shaker Aamer to pressure the US to release him from an unjust imprisonment. William Hague made the following statement on an E-petition site.

“The UK believes that indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay is wrong and will continue to call for Guantanamo Bay to be closed and Mr Aamer to be returned to his family in the UK. I have personally raised his case with Secretary Clinton on a number of previous occasions, and we will continue to engage with the US on this issue until a solution is reached.”

This case highlights the one-sidedness of the UK’s agreement with the United States. Despite the UK’s discomfort with some of its arrangements with its US ally, the subservience of the UK towards the US is evident. For example, Theresa May recently sent five Muslims, two of whom had spent between them eighteen years in English prisons, to face an indeterminate sentence in Supermax prisons in the United States, knowing the way Shaker Aamer has been treated in Guantanamo. Remember: Shaker Aamer has a son he has never seen.

Editor’s Note: Photographs one and four US Army, and photograph seven by Paul Keller.

References

[i] P 31, http://911-truth.net/911_Anthrax_Attacks_Dimitri_Khalezov_English.pdf

[ii] http://www.globalresearch.ca/zero-dark-thirty-torturing-the-facts/5318444

[iii] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-57565956/julian-assange-wikileaks-film-script-leaked-to-wikileaks/

[iv] http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/33133

[v] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/radical-muslim-cleric-abu-hamza-and-terror-suspect-babar-ahmad-lose-extradition-appeal-8168191.html

[1] P 31, http://911-truth.net/911_Anthrax_Attacks_Dimitri_Khalezov_English.pdf

[2] http://www.globalresearch.ca/zero-dark-thirty-torturing-the-facts/5318444

[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-57565956/julian-assange-wikileaks-film-script-leaked-to-wikileaks/

[4] http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/33133

[5] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/radical-muslim-cleric-abu-hamza-and-terror-suspect-babar-ahmad-lose-extradition-appeal-8168191.html

The internet lost a major figure in the person of Aaron Swartz on Friday January 11. Swartz, who was facing a possible 50 years in prison and $4 million fine for downloading the contents of JSTOR from an MIT computer, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26 years old. Swartz is credited with co-authoring RSS1.0 when he was 14 and being one of the co-founders of Reddit, but his most important contributions to the internet have been his staunch commitment to the free dissemination of information and along with this, the protection of privacy. Swartz was a creator of Tor2Web, a founder of Open Access as well as the Demand Progress movement that successfully fought the Internet censorship bills (SOPA/PIPA). I spoke to Carlos Gomez, who has been involved with the MIT hacker culture since the 1980’s, more specifically about Aaron Swartz and what he stood for.

Dady Chery
Co-Editor in Chief, News Junkie Post

Dady Chery. Aaron Swartz is credited with Tor2Web. Would you explain this contribution? How important is it?

Carlos Gomez. Tor2web is an anonymizer based on a volunteer network. It works as follows. Every request for a web page requires an addressee and a return address, and you need this return address, because the page requested needs to know where to send the information. So how do you get anonymity? Let’s say you are writing a snail mail requesting a document. The upper left corner has the return address; the middle of envelope has the delivery address. You obviously need these two pieces of information. So this envelope goes to a postman who picks it up, the local post office, a central office, etc., and gets passed along many times before it reaches its final destination. Without opening the envelope, anyone who handles it knows where it’s going to and where it came from. Suppose instead, you took the letter, put the “TO” and “FROM” addresses inside it and encrypted the whole thing, and then put that letter in an envelope that had the address of a trusted person instead who knew how to decode it. That person could open the letter, decode the TO and FROM addresses, put it in a new envelope, encrypt it again and forward it. And this could be done any number of times, until the final address is that of the final recipient. Each recipient would only know the previous and next person in the chain. The Tor browser performs the electronic equivalent of this manual encoding/decoding/shuffling of envelopes automatically and transparently for any user of TOR.

DC. How do you know that Tor itself can be trusted?

CG. The TOR software is open-source, meaning that every line of the software is published and open for inspection. While you yourself may not be enough of a geek to verify personally that the software works as intended, you can rely on a large network of highly paranoid geeks who have already minutely examined this code for you. This is in sharp contrast to Internet Explorer or Safari, the default browsers that come preloaded in Windows and Apple computers, respectively. These proprietary browsers are totally black-box, and could be forwarding every syllable directly to the CIA, for all you know. The principles of open source, most eloquently described by Richard Matthew Stallman (rms),  are a foundation of free information. People who use software should know its contents and be able to share it and modify it for their personal preference. When you buy a car or anything else, you are entitled to modify it any way you want. You might void the warranty, but you’ll never get arrested.

DC. But if you publish the source, doesn’t this mean that anyone can steal it?

CG. Yes. The same way anyone can plagiarize “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Whoever heard of a work of literature covered under copyright being encoded to keep people from plagiarizing it? It is outrageous that software can be covered by copyright at all. Software is not literature. It is much more like an invention and is more aptly covered by patent law. Of course, patents also require that the principles of any invention be completely explained and accessible. Before patents, inventors used to protect their intellectual property by simply keeping the principles of operation secret. This solution inhibits the growth of engineering knowledge. Patent law is a contract in which the public grants an inventor monopoly rights for a limited term in exchange for a full disclosure of the principles of the invention. Under patent law, every competent individual is ready to exploit the technology as soon as the patent expires, enriching and extending it to the benefit of the general public. It is expected that during the monopoly period, the inventor will be able to recover all of his costs of development plus a reasonable profit. Intellectual property protection of closed-source software tries to have it both ways: they get the protected monopoly, yet the public does not receive the full access to technology that is the public’s side of the bargain.

DC. Some say that Swartz’ opposition to SOPA/PIPA made him some very powerful enemies who felt that he was encouraging the theft of their intellectual property.

CG. SOPA/PIPA was meant to protect rights that corporations should not be allowed to have. Copyright laws were developed to protect the livelihood of authors — not the corporations that buy the right to an author’s work. By this reasoning, there is no sense to a copyright outliving its author, since no amount of incentive would entice that author to further efforts. Furthermore, copyrights should be held by real persons, never by corporations, which should have to license the copyright from a living person. The rise of digital media was never envisioned by the original authors of copyright law, and the control of pliant legislators by powerful media conglomerates have led to extensions of copyright law that are totally inconsistent with the original intent of these laws. The only justification that serves the public for a legal protection of “intellectual property” is that this protection ultimately increases, rather than inhibits, access to information.

DC. Aaron Swartz got into legal trouble for downloading JSTOR documents from an MIT computer. What is JSTOR, and do you think this information should be public?

CG. JSTOR is a repository of classic literature from a large variety of fields. This information is typically scanned because it predates digital publishing. Much of this literature is from publicly-funded research. Scientific publications differ from other literature in that they are meant to be applied to future research. In the case of publicly-funded research, taxpayers cannot derive the full benefit of what they have paid for unless they get unfettered access to it. The journals that claim ownership did not pay for the research, did not pay for the authors to write the papers, and did not even pay for the reviews. So their sole, extremely dubious, claim to the ownership of papers is based on their ability to coerce some poor sucker into signing their work over to them for free: the suckers in questions being the authors, the reviewers, and the tax-paying public. Why should we pay to have anybody, including somebody, say, in Ghana, who could not afford the extremely expensive journal fees, be able to get this freely? Science is completely global. It is in the taxpayer’s benefit, not only to have this information available to other taxpayers, but also to have it available to everybody. Another scientist in some unexpected place could be the one who takes the research to the next level. The more eyeballs, the more minds get access, the more robustly science develops. Pure research is founded on the free exchange of information. Anything less than total access means that everyone is being cheated. Period. The taxpaying public, authors and reviewers give up their intellectual property rights specifically so that the information can be made most widely available and applied. Usurpation of these property rights by the journals is theft.

Stallman, who is known for the phrase “Information wants to be free!” carried the concept of free information well beyond software. He invented the concept of “copyleft”, which is a copyright that is taken, not to restrict access to intellectual property but instead to guarantee free access by preempting corporate copyright claims. Swartz’s open access movement basically calls for scientists to take copylefts on their publications rather than surrender their copyright to the journals.

DC. Any thoughts about MIT’s role in Swartz’ troubles?

CG. It is ironic that MIT the institution is so hostile to the ideals of hacker culture, with which many creative people who work for MIT, including Stallman and web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee, are so closely associated. MIT people have been absolutely instrumental to hacker culture, whose contributions have greatly enhanced MIT’s reputation. Project Athena, for example, which brings academic online courses to the whole world for free is an honor to MIT and a great example of free exchange of information.

DC. What do you think would be a fitting tribute to Aaron Swartz?

CG. Amend the copyright law to say:

1. Any publicly funded research, past or present, is ineligible for copyright protection.

2. Software is not covered under copyright law but properly falls under patent law as an invention.

Read the complete text of Aaron Swartz’ Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, in his own eloquent words.

Editor’s Note: Photograph one by Sage Ross. Photograph two by Mike Licht and photographs five, six and seven by Donkey Hotey.

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 transported 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. Photographs one and five by Carolina Georgatou. Photographs two, three, six, and seven by The Girl 78 and photograph four by Liam Fox.

References

[i] http://newsjunkiepost.com/2012/12/19/how-sweden-collaborated-with-cia-on-renditions-and-framing-of-assange/

[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

By Dady Chery and Gilbert Mercier

Solving problems with violence is as American as apple pie

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has become public enemy number one amongst left-leaning Americans since the most recent incident of random shooting. Is blaming the NRA a convenient way for Americans to avoid some necessary soul searching: a refusal to address the deeply-rooted cultural problem of violence being the preferred method of conflict resolution and most popular source of entertainment in areas that include sports, movies, TV, and video games? In essence, violence provides the backdrop to nearly all aspects of life in the United States. The government has glamorized violence by conducting endless wars, maintaining a gargantuan prison system, and keeping the death penalty legal. The US economy has increasingly become a war economy since 2001, and the business of death is booming. Recruitment centers for the US military are popping up in every high school and shopping mall. Television and cinema advertisements for the Marines have the slick and sexy look of Hollywood trailers. “Be all you can be!” says Uncle Sam, who carefully omits from his sales pitch that the main requirements for the job are the willingness to kill and get killed.

Can one blame the NRA when the US president runs a kill list from the White House?

A couple of days after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, president Obama’s approval rating jumped up more than five percent. Mr. Obama was proud and excited to take responsibility for the extrajudicial killing: “shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda.” Everywhere, newspaper headlines shouted “We took him out!” and the US public glowed from the pleasure of doing away with their favorite bogeyman. Killing people for the US federal government has become a quite simple affair that can even be done remotely, as in a video game, with drones that reach anywhere in the world from Yemen to Pakistan. The countless innocent victims of these drone attacks are called “collateral damage.” Most people in the US could care less about them, the understanding being that it is all right to kill people who had the bad luck to go to a market, mosque, or wedding at the wrong time.

So a man loses his job and kills his boss and numerous colleagues at his place of work.  This has become so common that it is called “going postal,” or more politely, “workplace violence.” Every year, more than 10 Americans on average are gunned down in such workplace killing sprees. The enemy is quite close, especially for women. For example, of 429,729 homicide FBI files examined by evolutionary psychologist David Buss, 13,670 (or 3%) were cases in which a husband killed his wife. Thus, in their more intimate roles as jilted lovers or unloved sons, a small fraction of men murder not only their mates or parents but also everyone else who happens to be nearby at the wrong time.  Why should collateral damage be solely the purview of the President? After all, he is considered to be the country’s ultimate role model. And why should Americans be surprised by an endemic violence problem when their role model, their foremost example of what one does with power, runs an assassination program directly from the White House?

Guns and America: A love affair

One week after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mr. Wayne LaPierre broke the NRA’s silence with a press conference. LaPierre argued that only more guns in the hands of “good guys” could stop America’s killing spree.

“I call on Congress today to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation. Innocent lives might have been spared if armed security was present at Sandy Hook. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said LaPierre. Besides this “good guy with gun” versus “bad guy with guns” argument, reminiscent of a John Wayne Western movie cliche, LaPierre blamed the mass shootings on popular culture like “vicious, violent video games” such as ‘Bulletstorm’, ‘Grand Theft Auto’, ‘Mortal Kombat’ and ‘Splatterhouse’ and on movies such as ‘American Psycho’ and ‘Natural Born Killer’ for “portraying life as a joke and murder as a way of life. In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate, and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing on ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes,” added LaPierre.

The supposed adverse effect of popular culture on vulnerable minds is a perennial argument that gets brought up after each shooting, although the details vary. But this argument is about as sound as blaming a flood on the movie “Waterworld.” Violence is ubiquitous in American life, and it is quite natural that it should pervade American fantasies and popular culture.

Who are LaPierre’s “good guys?” Might they be the policemen who routinely criminalize and kill innocent black youths in urban centers? Might they be part of the growing security sector? Or could they be the teenage students who meet a life-size cardboard cutout of a machine-gun toting soldier at the entrance to their high schools every day? One moment of impatience about growing into full adulthood is all it takes for them to sign away their lives. Thus the dear children survive elementary school, junior high school, and finally high school, only to be sent off to kill people in places like Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan. There they learn not to distinguish those who are defending their countries from invasion from those who either cannot fight (like children and the elderly) or choose not to fight. The cost is their very soul. Many return hollowed out and suicidal.

A culture of death

By far the most violent practice of the US is capital punishment, in which a person is made completely defenseless and then killed in cold blood by the state with the collusion of its citizens. The shooters, who are well aware of this, typically conclude their sprees in a quick suicide, thus depriving the state of the sadistic process involving a protracted stay on death row and numerous appeals. The practice of the death penalty is all the more gruesome for its discrimination based on race and the innocence of many of those killed.  An Innocence Project study in 2011 discovered that, of 230 individuals exonerated in the US by DNA Testing, 17 had been sentenced to die.

For US presidential candidates, the support of capital punishment has become a rite of passage: the ultimate proof of their willingness to kill the innocent so as to support an expansion of US wars and weapons sales. Former US President Clinton suspended his presidential campaign so he could return to Arkansas to make sure Ricky Ray Rector was executed. Rector was so mentally impaired and clueless about his fate that, before his execution, he asked the guards to save his pecan pie “for later.” On the evening of George W. Bush’s inauguration as Governor, the state of Texas executed Mario Marquez, who was brain damaged and had the skills of a seven-year old; later, when Mr. Bush was a presidential candidate, he mocked Karla Faye Tucker in an interview a year after her execution. On November 6, while Mr. Obama celebrated his reelection with an elated public by hugging his wife, mentally-ill Oklahoma inmate Garry Allen, who had been watching the election with great enthusiasm, was executed.

The violence of the state, domestically and abroad, is pervasive. It is celebrated: even sexy. Violence breeds more violence and, in a sense, we have become collateral damage.

Editor’s Note: Photographs one, two, three and seven by United States Marine Corps. Photographs five and six by Joe Loong.

By Rafik Saley, Okoth Osewe, and John Goss

By his own admission, Sweden’s Ambassador to Australia Mr. Sven-Olof Petersson had advance knowledge of the CIA rendition flight that took place on December 18, 2001 from Stockholm to Egypt. This flight ended in Egyptian nationals Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery being illegally rendered and tortured. Mr. Petersson’s admission comes from a statement to the Swedish Parliament’s Constitutional Committee, confirming that he attended a briefing on December 17, 2001 at which the rendition process was finalized. Moreover, the Constitutional Committee’s report shows that he knew about the renditions at the end of November and probably even in mid-November. In fact, it was he who kept Minister of Foreign Affairs Anna Lindh updated on the progress of deportation arrangements with the CIA in November 2001.[i] Petersson was then Sweden’s Director General for Political Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[ii]

Illegal and unconstitutional decisions of this sort, made behind closed doors, show contempt for the Swedish legal system, which has been further denigrated by attempts to get Wikileaks founder Julian Assange flown to Sweden on flimsy allegations of a sexual nature, from where, concerned parties believe the CIA would pick him up and put him on trial in the United States. Ironically, it was through Wikileaks that the world learned about the diplomatic tiff between the US and Sweden that brought an end to Swedish rendition in 2006.[iii]

As the Director General for Political Affairs, Mr. Petersson was in regular contact with the US Embassy in Stockholm and was aware of the US request that two Egyptian nationals be illegally rendered.[iv] The rendition went ahead without protest or representation on behalf of the victims, and no one in the Swedish government has been made accountable for this flagrant breach of the law. An admission of Sweden’s culpability can be found in the SEK 3 million (about $458,000) compensation paid to each of the two men after their eventual release.[v] This “hush money” appears to have paid for the non-disclosure of the identities of the Swedish representatives who sought assurances from Cairo prior to the men’s rendition.[vi]

Not only Petersson, but also Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström and then Foreign Minister Anna Lindh knew about the renditions.[vii] Thomas Bodström spent a year in the US between 2010 – 2011, purportedly for rehabilitation in connection with alcohol and substance abuse, while he was a partner in the legal firm Borgström & Bodström. It would be lax not to point out to readers that Claes Borgström is the lawyer who was called upon to prosecute Julian Assange over allegations that had previously been dismissed. Further, Borgström is known to be friendly with Irmeli Krans, the police interrogator who took SW’s original statement against Assange. Irmeli Krans, in turn, is friendly with the other complainant, AA, who, it is said, illegally sat in on Irmeli Krans’ interview of SW.[viii]

The rendered Egyptians, both of whom were asylum seekers, were returned to Egypt despite Sweden’s Aliens Act (1989) that forbids repatriation to a country where nationals are likely to be tortured. It was well known even then that Egypt uses torture against political prisoners.[ix] The torture of both men on the flight to Egypt, included them being hooded, handcuffed and strapped down. The brutality of the torture in Egypt was captured in a comment by Mr. Agiza who noted that the interrogators routinely beat him, strapped him to a wet mattress and subjected him to electric shock through electrodes attached to his ear lobes, nipples, and genitals.[x]

Mr. Petersson´s statements to the Australian media on the impartiality of the Swedish legal system ring hollow when judged against his prior personal involvement in renditions. Even more disturbing is the fact that they have been echoed by Australian Foreign minister Bob Carr. The adoption of the statements shows a lack of judgment on Carr’s part and brings the Australian government’s foreign policy under scrutiny. Carr has urged Assange to travel to Sweden and claimed that it was unlikely that he would be extradited.[xi] Recent statements by EU Home Affairs Minister Cecilia Malmström, urging Mr. Assange to “just go to Sweden” have the same hollow ring.[xii] Malmström has worked closely with US interests in Sweden and elsewhere in adopting harsh measures to stifle free speech in Europe. She purports to know nothing about the Assange case. On the other hand, her partiality and close affinity to the United States are demonstrated by her recent joint briefing with US attorney general Eric Holder.[xiii] She has also co-authored an article with him.[xiv]

The question on every reasonable person’s lips is: why can’t the Swedish government “just give Mr. Assange the diplomatic guarantees that he has asked for?” In light of Sweden´s complicity in illegal rendition right up to 2006, a diplomatic guarantee to Assange that he won’t be extradited to the US is of integral importance. After all, the Swedish government has the final say in the matter and, if its past history in illegal renditions is anything to go by, Assange’s fears about extradition or rendition to the United States are justifiable.

The Swedish Ambassador accuses Sydney Morning Herald columnist Elizabeth Farrelly of having no knowledge of Sweden.[xv] It is imperative that the columnist learns about Sweden and its foreign policy of the past 20 years, so she might pass on the sinister dealings to her readership. Until recent years, Sweden had a peace policy of which to be proud. For 150 years, the country abstained from war and, in 1966, to celebrate this highly-enviable record, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) was established. After Sweden started cooperating with NATO, the situation began to change.[xvi] Not long afterwards, the Swedish military became involved in world conflicts, and more recently it has looked poised for greater involvement.[xvii] This is not the old Sweden but a new country that demonstrates an unparalleled hypocrisy in its international relations. This trend continues in the refusal by authorities to grant Assange the reasonable assurances that he seeks.

Prominent international supporters of Mr. Assange, like Baltasar Garzon, John Pilger, Michael Moore, and Jemima Khan are ridiculed in Sweden today. In addition to the recent changes in foreign and domestic policy, the third largest political party in the country, called Sweden Democrats (SD), has made massive gains during the last elections, despite openly calling for the repatriation of immigrants from Sweden. The SD party enjoyed a 10%  parliamentary share of the vote, which translated into 20 Parliamentary seats. The Swedish government seems to be following the direction of the SD party, especially in its foreign policy positions, which are increasingly pro-American and anti-democratic.

Because of Sweden’s pro-American stance on key political issues, a legal system has developed with multiple loopholes that could easily be exploited to Assange’s disadvantage. This legal framework is constitutionally racist against foreigners, especially when they contest ethnic Swedish nationals of the cherished blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordic model. Most worrying of all, Sweden’s history of hypocrisy, lopsidedness and double-speak in dealings with the international community highlights the risk that Julian Assange would be in physical danger if extradited to Sweden from the UK. Under such circumstances, it is reasonable for him to seek unequivocal diplomatic assurances that he would not be extradited to the US if he agrees to go to Sweden for questioning.

Despite the pressures from the United States and other pro-western governments, the Republic of Ecuador has granted political asylum to Mr. Assange. On the other hand, the United Kingdom has hindered the free movement of Mr. Assange even though the same government blocked the extradition to Spain of the late Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Mr. Pinochet was wanted for the murder of 94 Spanish citizens and many other charges of torture and rape against his own people. Although Julian Assange is an Australian citizen, the Australian government has refused to protect him and has instead accommodated Swedish Ambassador Sven-Olof Petersson, who supports rendition and torture. This is unacceptable in a free, democratic and transparent society.

Editor’s Notes: Rafik Saley is general secretary of the African Committee for Development in Stockholm, Sweden; Okoth Osewe writes for Kenya Stockholm Blog; John Goss is a writer and researcher, United Kingdom.

References

[i] http://data.riksdagen.se/dokument/GT01KU2

[ii] http://www.swedenabroad.com/en-GB/Embassies/Canberra/About-us/Embassy-Staff/The-Ambassador/

[iii] http://www.swedishwire.com/politics/7497-cia-rendition-flights-stopped-by-swedish-military

[iv] http://data.riksdagen.se/dokument/GT01KU2

[v] http://www.civilrightsdefenders.org/news/swedish-ahmed-agiza-frislappt/

[vi] http://www.redress.org/CAT_2005_AgizavSweden.pdf (Paragraph 4.12)

[vii] http://data.riksdagen.se/dokument/GT01KU2

[viii] http://www.swedenversusassange.com/Police-Bias.html

[ix] http://www.redress.org/CAT_2005_AgizavSweden.pdf (Paragraph 3.3)

[x] http://www.expose-the-war-profiteers.org/archive/legal/2008-1/20080630.pdf P3

[xi] http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/carr-hits-back-at-assange-attacks-as-lawyer-hints-at-surprise-in-store-20120824-24pq7.html

[xii] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-official-tells-julian-assange-just-go-to-sweden-8376295.html

[xiii] http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/photo/photoByReportageNews.cfm?rid=8543&sitelang=en

[xiv] http://www.todayszaman.com/news-299892-the-borderless-crime-against-children-by-cecilia-malmstrom-eric-holder*.html

[xv] http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/ambassadors-rage-doesnt-dispel-facts-20121128-2ae99.html

[xvi] http://books.sipri.org/files/misc/SIPRI01NSD.pdf

[xvii] http://rt.com/news/sweden-nato-military-protest/

Editor’s Note: Photographs four and eight by Wikileaks Mobile Information Collection Unit.

“I am for truth, no matter who tells it. I am for justice, no matter who it’s for or against.” Malcom X

This statement from Malcom X applies directly to Bradley Manning and his courageous decision to put his life and freedom on the line to bring critical information to the public. November 27, 2012 is an international day of action in solidarity with Bradley Manning. Besides the United States, protests will be held in England, Canada, and Australia. In the US and England, the event is organized and sponsored by Veterans for Peace. During a hearing scheduled tomorrow, the defense for Manning intends to argue that all charges should be dismissed on account of “unlawful pretrial punishment.”

Attorney David Coombs will shed light on the abuse perpetrated on Private Manning while he was incarcerated in Quantico, Virginia. The charges to be presented by Coombs are well known, documented, and very damaging to the US military. Private Manning was held for nine months in solitary confinement under conditions described by UN chief rapporteur on torture Juan E. Mendez as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”

It has been two and half years since Manning was taken into custody while serving in Kuwait. Bradley Manning was charged, because of the release to Wikileaks, with “aiding the enemy”: a capital offense for which he could be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. When Manning was transferred from Kuwait to Quantico Brig in July 2010, the US army issued the following statement:“Preferral of charges represents an accusation only; Manning is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty. The case will be processed in accordance with normal procedure under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”

However, the US military, and by extension the US government, have acted with complete disregard for their own legal framework. Manning was denied “a speedy trial,” as stipulated in the military code, and the codified rule of 120 days maximum became 635 days. Manning was also subjected to well-documented illegal pretrial punishment. The United States of America, under the Obama administration, often lectures other countries on their human-rights and justice-system records. But this is fundamentally hypocritical, considering the flagrant disrespect of basic principles of justice or even international laws exercised by the current and previous US administrations. Despite promises made by candidate Barack Obama all the way back in 2008, Guantanamo is still “open for business.” If the Bush administration was rightly condemned by the international community for its CIA rendition and torture programs, the Obama  administration is currently running an extensive  assassination program in total breach of countries’ sovereignty. The fate of Bradley Manning should be a concern for anyone who values truth and justice. In a real democracy, to expose the truth about war crimes should not be a crime but instead be praised as a public service.

Editor’s Note: All photographs by Save Bradley Network.

Who says the United States, Iran and North Korea cannot agree on anything? Most of us remember one of George W. Bush’s  “classic” speeches in front of the United Nations when he defined Iran, Venezuela and North Korea as “the Axis of Evil”. In the case of the death penalty, however, the US, Iran and North Korea perfectly agree. As matter of fact, Iran and the US share the dubious distinction of having been among the top five killer states for three years in a row. On November 19, 2012, the US joined forces with some of its enemies to oppose an international moratorium on capital punishment. The vote took place in the United Nations General Assembly. The draft resolution to call on states “to establish a moratorium on executions, with a view to abolish the death penalty” was approved by a vote of 110 in favor to 39 against, with 36 nations abstaining.

In 2011, the top executioners were China with more than 1,000, Iran with 360, Saudi Arabia with 82, Iraq with 68, the United States with 43, Yemen with 41 and North Korea with 30. The United States is the only country from the G8 group of leading global economies to carry out executions. China’s UN representative justified his negative vote on the moratorium by expressing “regrets that the issue was again up for discussion”. He also said that “the use of the death penalty belongs to a country’s national jurisdiction, and no country had any right to interfere”. The US delegate said that “the ultimate decision must rest on domestic democratic practices within countries, consistent with international law, and may be imposed for the most serious crimes”.

People around the world have long demanded an end to capital punishment. The global trend to abolish the death penalty is quickly growing. Today, some 150 states have either formally abolished the death penalty or do not practice it. The death penalty is impossible to reconcile with the notion of human rights. The death penalty is, by definition, cruel and inhuman. Capital punishment tends to be discriminatory by affecting mainly the poor, the powerless and people from minority communities.

Human rights organizations have fought for years to abolish the death penalty. In 2007, at the behest of France, the United Nations became more active in the push to end this barbaric practice where a state becomes a legal killer. The inhuman practice of capital punishment should be opposed worldwide in all cases, without exception. The death penalty should be abolished regardless of the nature of the crime, the characteristics of the offender, or the methods of the state to kill the prisoner. Capital punishment is incompatible with human rights.

Editor’s Note: All photographs by World Coalition Against the Death Penalty.