Assange and Chomsky Appear Arm-In-Arm at Ecuadorian Embassy

[Octafish]

107. PoliceLeaks

How the Swedes Set Up Julian Assange

by ISRAEL SHAMIR
CounterPunch, MARCH 07, 2011

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.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/03/07/how-the-swedes-set-up-julian-assange/