PoliceLeaks
By Israel Shamir
The British magistrate court has
decided to surrender Julian Assange to the Nordic
Amazons who were hunting for his head – pending appeal.
Thus the long Saga of the Broken Condom, or
whatever name by which it will become known to
posterity, took a definite turn for the worse. The judge
decided to honor the European Arrest Warrant issued by
man-eating Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny. Julian has
appealed to the High Court, ensuring that the saga will
go on as a side divertissement to the main story,
Cablegate.
We shall not delve again into what
happened between Julian and the two women; this has
already been
covered in previous installments. Today we turn to
the dramatic events that occurred immediately
afterwards. We live in an age of leaks, and this story
is no exception. The Swedish police papers pertaining
to Assange case have surfaced on the web – and there are
some shocking revelations. One revelation concerns the
investigative editor of The Guardian, David Leigh
and his accomplice Nick Davies. They were given the
leaked police papers well before they were made public,
and Davies constructed a
story that revealed his special “unauthorised
access”. Now the original documents (in Swedish) have
been published on the site flashback.org, and the
English version is now available on
Rixstep.com with this touching foreword from the
translator:
“The truth will out, the truth wins
out. Let no journalist ever again speculate into what
the protocols say. Six months of digging and the people
at Flashback have the actual documents. The
sleaze printed by rags such as the Daily Mail,
Sweden's Aftonbladet and Expressen, and
perhaps above all the toxic Nick Davies of The
Guardian, can stand no more. Yet more: these
documents are an indictment of the 'news organisations'
who've printed deliberate inaccuracies all along or even
worse: refused to print anything at all. Nick Davies'
account of the protocols was maliciously skewed; both
Aftonbladet and Expressen had copies early on
and printed nothing. Bloggers had copies but arrogantly
kept the information to their Smeagol selves.”
Once again we can compare the raw
data with the official story, and once again we can
confirm that Leigh and his partners are brazen, busy
little cooks. They cooked the Embassy Cables, as we
reported in Counterpunch, and now we can see
exactly how they cooked the Assange police papers too.
Leigh and his supporters have loudly proclaimed that his
deletions and redactions were due to British libel laws.
In this story, he proves how empty was his rhetoric.
Every damaging accusation against Assange was given a
place of prominence; the true and disturbing picture has
remained buried until now.
Our story begins on Friday, August
20, 2010, when the two women of our story, Anna Ardin
and Sofia Wilen met in Stockholm, compared their
experiences and discussed how to commemorate their
weekend with Julian. Manipulative and ambitious, Anna
Ardin had decided to get some sweet revenge on our
breezy, festive Julian, who had drifted like a butterfly
away from her bed and over to the bed of the younger
Sofia. Anna’s plan was to stay out of the limelight –
she convinced Sofia to make out the complaint. But she
did arrange for it: Anna took Sofia to see the police.
But Anna did not take Sofia directly
to the nearest police station. No, Anna had already
arranged an appointment with her good friend,
policewoman Irmeli Krans. Anna Ardin and Irmeli Krans
were once political running mates for a city hall
election – Irmeli came in at 38th place and Anna won
12th. Irmeli is a well-known gender activist, a member
of the LGBT movement and the Gay Police Union. Krans’s
blog is full of pictures taken at gay parades from
Riga, Tallinn, and Stockholm. It might appear as if this
stern criminal investigator treats her police work as a
hobby while her real work is attending gay parades all
over Europe, but she dropped everything for the Assange
case.
Anna delivered Sofia to the police
station only after the main force had gone home at 4 pm,
leaving Anna’s friend Irmeli to handle the distraught
Sofia. At 4:21pm, Irmeli began writing what would later
be described as “the interrogation of Sofia Wilen”. Anna
Ardin was always present in the room: she brought Sofia
in and introduced her to the policewoman, but her
presence was never mentioned in the protocols. This is a
gross violation of law: fellow witnesses are never
present during police questioning! Furthermore, every
person present at the inquiry must be listed, yet Anna
unaccountably remains invisible. She gave no evidence at
all.
In the end, all this careful
police-room theatre was spoiled with a too-hasty
denouement. The interrogation was not even over before a
different policewoman, as if on cue, called the
prosecutor and obtained an order to arrest Julian in
absentia. It almost seems as if a thoughtful hand
had prearranged it all. The prosecutor issued the arrest
warrant without having read the complaint and before
Anna had made a statement or even a complaint. The
climax of our drama took place at 6 pm on Friday, and
yet the very next morning (Saturday, August 21st),
the sleazy right-wing tabloid Expressen, a
Swedish clone of the New York Post, had already
published all of the police allegations, featuring a
photo of Assange on the front page and the headline
‘DOUBLE RAPIST’.
That was a Pentagon threat coming
true. The US military demanded from Assange to destroy
all the files, or else. “If doing the right thing is not
good enough for them (WikiLeaks), then we will figure
out what other alternatives we have to compel them to do
the right thing," the Pentagon spokesman said. The sex
case was a device to compel Julian, and Sofia’s feelings
were of no importance.
The leaked police papers reveal that
Sofia was heart-broken when she learned of the charges;
she never expected Assange to be charged with rape. As
we learn in testimony from her American boyfriend, Sofia
was raised to have a hysterical fear of unprotected sex.
After a lifetime of horror stories, she feared the fatal
consequences of unprotected sex; she was terrified at
the thought of viruses crawling over her body, and the
only thing she wanted from the police was to force
Julian to take an STD test immediately. Julian was
willing but the labs were closed for weekend.
Even Irmeli Krans, our man-hating
interrogator, could not help but think there was no
crime committed. Apparently Irmeli had made plans to
comfort Sofia, and voiced her intentions to her
superiors; she was promptly taken off the case and her
boss Mats Gehlin took over. The first thing he did was
order her to fix the record of the Sofia interview.
Irmeli knew this was wrong, and she wrote him a message
saying “With
the risk of appearing difficult I do not want to have an
unsigned document with my name circulating in
DurTvå-space. Particularly not now when the case has
developed as it has.“
But he kept pushing her, and eventually she submitted to
his authority. The computer system (DurTvå)
however, would not
allow her to falsify the records – instead, the system
re-dated the protocols to August 26, a sure sign of
tampering. So now the original protocol does not even
exist. Yet even after doctoring the records, the
interrogation of Sofia Wilen is a most peculiar one: she
did not sign it and there is no voice recording, so we
can only guess what went on in there. Discrepancies in
Swedish police records might not be news, but that night
of August 20th - the night the prosecutor
authorized Julian’s arrest - was a very busy night for a
pandering political party and its pet journalists.
That evening there had been a lavish
crayfish party at Harpsund Slott, the Prime Minister’s
summer residence, a Swedish
Chequers.
Harpsund is a fabulous place, and every important guest
of the Swedish government has visited it: from Nikita
Khrushchev to Angela Merkel. Besides the Prime Minister
and the Foreign Minister, there were present several
politicians and political journalists, among them Niklas
Svensson, a political journalist for Expressen.
Svensson was fired from Expressen in 2006 for
hacking into an opposition party computer and stealing
an important document, the party strategic paper for
elections. Later he was reinstalled and rewarded for his
strong political sympathies for the ruling right-wing
(and very pro-American) coalition.
That night Svensson received a
message on his cell phone describing the double
complaint against Julian, although we know that at the
time there was still only one reluctant statement. We
don’t know whether or not he shared the good news with
the ministers and Ambassadors at the party, but I don’t
see how he could have contained himself. The elections
were scheduled in thee weeks’ time, and the government
was eager to placate the Americans, upset at Julian’s
new Swedish base of operations. Svensson called the
police and the prosecutor, and they confirmed the news
as an official press release from the police department.
The next morning, policewoman Sara
Wennerblom telephoned Anna Ardin and told her that she
would have to give evidence. They did the interview by
telephone that same day. In this phone interview Anna
said that she freely consented to have sex with Assange,
but that she wouldn't have let it happen if she'd known
he didn't have a condom. So much for the rape charge! A
few hours later, the warrant was voided when another
prosecutor, Eva Finne, looked at the reports and
concluded that no crime was committed. Case closed.
But the closed case was soon to be
reopened. Pro-American right-wing forces in Sweden
wanted to do as much damage to Julian as possible. They
were worried that Sweden might become Wikileaks
headquarters, and they knew that allegations of sexual
misconduct would (and did) prevent Julian from obtaining
permanent residency. The right-wing Swedes were
supported and guided by
Karl Rove, the American political adviser and
longtime Bush supporter who has been advising Swedish
Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt for the past two years.
Reinfeldt would like to be considered “the Ronald Reagan
of Sweden”; he has tried for years to dismantle Swedish
socialism and bring them into NATO. The American lawyer
Roger Shuler has
argued convincingly that Rove’s fingerprints are all
over the Assange case.
In order to reopen the case, a law
firm run by two political heavyweights was brought in,
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, sorry, Bodstrom and
Borgstrom. Tweedledum Thomas Bodstrom was once a Justice
minister whose claim to fame is that he delivered two
hapless Swedish-resident Arabs to a CIA rendition plane
so that they could be tortured in one of Mubarak’s
jails. Tweedledee Claes Borgstrom was once a minister
for equality, no, not social equality, God forbid, but
“gender equality”. Feminism is always a good career move
for a Swedish man, at the very least as a way to atone
for his offensive gender. Borgstrom is a super-feminist,
forever calling for a more expansive definition of rape.
He famously stated that no woman could know for sure
whether or not she was raped; only the lawyers can tell
for sure. Swedish bloggers
noticed that he “defended the European Data
Retention Directive on the grounds that it helps
'catch more rapists'.”
Borgstrom spoke to his old comrade
Marianne Ny, and together they prepared new laws that
stretched the definition of rape so far that “if a woman
doesn't have multiple orgasms during hetero sex, the man
can be charged with rape”, in the witty words of a
sister feminist. Ny is heading a ”development center”
specializing in sexual offences, and is attempting to
take feminism to the next level (a la
Valerie Solanas). Retired judge Brita
Sundberg-Wietman writes this about Marianne Ny: She
is known to have said that when a woman alleges she has
been a victim of assault by a man, it is a good idea to
have the man detained, because it is not until he is
arrested that the woman has time to think of her life in
peace and realize how she has been treated. According to
Ny the detention has a good effect as protection for the
woman ”even in cases where the perpetrator is prosecuted
but not found guilty”.
Marianne Ny is a prosecutor in
far-away Gothenburg, but Swedish laws allow her to take
on any case as long as there is some new development.
And lo and behold, under Borgstrom’s guidance new
evidence suddenly appeared: ten days after Julian’s
arrest and release, Anna Ardin carried a soiled condom
into a police station. The condom was checked, and the
examination came up blank: the condom showed no sign of
being used at all. But Marianne Ny did not need a
positive result, all she needed was a “new development”;
and so she re-opened the case.
Afterwards, she did nothing. From
time to time she called a witness to be interrogated,
but Julian was not called up again. It was only much
later, when he was in the UK, that Marianne Ny decided
to demand his extradition. This was a smart move. If she
had called him in for questioning while he was in
Sweden, the case would have immediately collapsed. Since
he will now be brought into Sweden against his will, Ny
and Borgstrom will be able to lock Assange up for months
until the trial, as Swedish law does not permit bail.
Once in custody, Julian can be shipped to the US, or
directly to Guantanamo without even returning to Sweden;
as a detained foreigner he can be deported at the
pleasure of the Swedish government.
Our hero has found himself in quite a
mess. And meanwhile, in order to create more confusion
and undermine Julian’s unflagging popularity, the
Guardian team has cooked up a new charge: this time
it is anti-Semitism. It is much easier to shout
“Anti-Semite!” than to defend The Guardian
against these very real accusations: falsification of
cables, plagiarism, manipulation, deliberate smearing of
Julian Assange… The best answer to their newest baseless
accusation is given in this fabulous
Julian Assange kicks little kittens video.
Anna Ardin: Follow Up
If Anna Ardin hoped to enjoy her
revenge, it misfired badly. She ran in the local
elections just after the story broke; she received 6
(six) votes altogether, while the next lowest contender
pulled 1500 votes. In a classic case of cooking your own
goose, Anna Ardin became the biggest turn-away name in
the country. Her only chance at rehabilitation lies in
the fact that she may be sought out by
Black PR agencies for her negative public relations
capabilities.
We wrote in Counterpunch that
the young lady had some CIA connections, and that she
was deported from Cuba for that very reason. Some
feminists pointed out that a lady should not be called
names after suffering at the hands of the brute Assange.
However, we have now a confirmation from a sterling
source: the BBC.
Their man in Cuba, Fernando Ravsberg
reported: “Anna Ardin, the Swede who is accusing Julian
Assange of rape, appears to have worked for some Cuban
dissident faction. Dissident sources confirmed that
Ardin supported the opposition in Cuba for years. “
“Manuel Cuesta, a leader of the
Arco Progresista admitted that this political
connection lasted from 2004 to 2006. The activities of
the Swede in Cuba had little to do with those of a
normal tourist. The opposition leader assured that she
“advised us on how to form a political party, we
exchanged bibliographies and her group gave us a minimal
amount of economic assistance.”
“It seems everything was running
along fine until she tried to “make us pay the cost” for
her services. According to the opponent, “she tried to
influence us too forcefully on how we should lead
Arco Progresista. Our reluctance generated certain
uneasiness on her part.”
Manuel Cuesta described her as a very
beautiful woman, “Self-centered, having a strong
personality, committed, intelligent and very
Eurocentric. Her principal virtue is her determination
and her worst defect is her Eurocentric arrogance.”
Cuesta told Ravsberg that in 2006
Anna established some tie with Carlos Alberto Montaner,
who is seen by some as a CIA contact. Montaner
vigorously
denied knowing Anna.
Ravsberg concluded: “Arco
Progresista has few certainties but many
suspicions. Manuel told us that all of this “enters
into an intriguing realm of political jockeying, and it
amazes me a little. We’re thinking back so we can piece
things together, because it’s evident that there’s
something strange in all this.”
Edited by Paul Bennett