Hammond egg on his face

Follow @JohnPlatinumG The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention after due consideration reached the conclusion that Julian Assange was being 'arbitrarily detained', that he should be released, compensated and given back his passport. Our Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, did not agree with the decision - though when earlier given an opportunity to appeal against the courts findings declined. Instead he waited for their conclusion  and lambasted the international lawyers who had made the advice. This is most improper and childish of someone without a legal background yet so high-ranking in the UK government.

"I reject the decision of this working group. It is a group made up of lay people and not lawyers. Julian Assange is a fugitive from justice. He is hiding from justice in the Ecuadorian embassy.

He can come out any time he chooses.. . . But he will have to face justice in Sweden if he chooses to do so. This is frankly a ridiculous finding by the working group and we reject it."

First let us see if he is right. Are they lay people? I think not. Click on this link which gives the credentials of the five international lawyers. These are biographies of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. The only person commenting adversely on these experts' credentials and opinions is someone least qualified to do so: Philip Hammond.

Can the UK reject the findings of the Working Group? Yes. One of the problems with international law is that findings can be rejected by a nation state. The UN Working Group is a higher authority than a nation state and the UK has a lot to lose by not applying the advice. You expect countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia not to abide by international law but traditionally, before the turn of the century, not countries like the UK.

All that changed with Tony Blair's illegal war on Iraq and since then human rights in the UK have gone decidedly downhill. There are all kinds of Acts to hold people in prison without trial, to hold courts in secret so that evidence cannot be tested, to prevent coroners from conducting inquests by replacing the inquest with an Inquiry, as in the recent Robert Owen Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko. Human rights, going right back to the Magna Carta (1215), are being dumped in the twenty first century. This, I believe, is part of a last-ditch attempt by failing empires to enslave the planet.

I am working on a draft to petition parliament, the European Court of Human Rights, Philip Hammond himself, and Jeremy Corbyn to compel Hammond to obey international law. The UK is a permanent member of the Security Council of the United Nations and Hammond is trying to make a mockery of that body. The reason the League of Nations (predecessor to the United Nations) failed was because certain countries did not abide by League of Nations' findings.

The powerlessness of the League of Nations was demonstrated most conspicuously in the Lytton Inquiry which investigated the false-flag Mukden Incident (1931), in which the Japanese blew up a railway siding, blamed it on the Chinese, and used it as an excuse to invade Manchuria. Despite Japan being culpable according to the League of Nations, Japan ignored the findings and withdrew from the League of Nations in spring 1933. Three years later Haile Selassie petitioned the League of Nations to intervene to stop Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia). Again it proved to be powerless to help. Finally Hitler's planned invasion of the Sudetenland, in what may have been a genuine attempt to avoid war by the UK and France a quadrilateral agreement between Italy, Germany, UK and France, allowed Germany to march into Czechoslovakia. The League of Nations stayed silent. Some may be old enough to recall that Japan, Germany and Italy were enemies of the allied forces in World War II.

With the case of Julian Assange the UK and Swedish governments are proposing to disobey international law in order to perpetrate the same kind of nation-state criminality the League of Nations was unable to prevent. Even if Julian Assange took advantage of a woman he had earlier that night had consensual sex with, he has been incarcerated for five years, in prison, house arrest and where he is now at the Ecuadorian Embassy. For a first offence it would be more than a severe punishment. Thinking people know that this is an attempt to get him extradited to the United States because of his revelations through Wikileaks of war crimes by that country. We really need to oppose these breaches before we end up being called fascists ourselves.

Torture is in fashion

Follow @JohnPlatinumG At a time when the tortured chickens of UN and CIA rendition are coming home to roost Gulnara Karimova flaunts herself as a dedicated follower of fashion and yoga exponent. She is also described as a diplomat, executing the duties of a UN envoy, a screenwriter, oh, and a jewellery designer. Keeping active is an important feature in the life of a dictator's daughter. She has always been conscious about her image even though two years back she was described, thanks to Wikileaks cables, as the most despised woman in Uzbekistan.

Her father is the notorious Islam Karimov, who has pretty well set himself up as permanent president of Uzbekistan and all the speculation suggests she is most likely to follow in his footsteps if he retires, being labelled in one Russian blog as the Mafia Princess. Karimov became president in 1990 and has no opposition, since serious opponents tend to disappear without trace. He is friends with US power-mongers and feels as comfortable in the presence of George W. Bush as Hilary Clinton appears in Karimov's company.


Photo courtesy of Dominic Streatfeild's, A History of the World since 9/11, published in February 2011 (UK) by Atlantic Books, August 2011 (US) by Bloomsbury Press.

The issue of torture in Uzbekistan was raised by Craig Murray when he was ambassador there but because of our transatlantic allegiance it was thought better to get rid of Murray than bring Karimov to international justice. Karimov's human rights record is even worse than that of the United States. As well as the disappearances of his opponents he has been criticised for his regime's widespread use of torture and the exploitation of children in the cotton fields.

Yesterday, both in Strasbourg and the UK, two torture victims were compensated for their ordeals.£2.2 million pounds of taxpayers money was paid in compensation to Libyan dissident, Sami al Saadi, for being illegally rendered back to Libya to face torture under the Gadaffi regime when Tony Blair was still friends with Gadaffi, while from Germany, Khaled el Masri, was rendered by the CIA to Macedonia where in front of Macedonian police, who witnessed the scene, CIA operatives buggered, shackled and beat him. The European Court of Human Rights ordered Macedonia to pay him €60,000 (£49,000) in compensation and requested that the US must apologise and make a voluntary contribution to Mr el Masri. Anybody see a connection that two cases are concluded at the same time? It is not a coincidence. The vast sums are paid to keep names like Jack Straw, and his culpability, off the record. It is hush money!

Today I co-wrote with editorial input an article concerned with Sweden's rendition programme at the behest of the CIA, concentrating mainly on the cases of Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al Zery, who were extradited to Egypt where they were both imprisoned and tortured. In both cases the men were paid compensation of 3 million Kronors. Mr. Agiza spent 10 years in prison. We have British citizens, Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan, for whom this blog tried to prevent extradition, suffering in US supermax prisons because Theresa May extradited them to the US even though they had already spent unreasonable times in UK prisons without even being charged. They have done nothing wrong but in the US 98% of prisoners confess in plea bargains just to get a shorter sentence because of the harshness of conditions. It too is torture.

Back to Gulnara Karimov and her repressive regime backed by the US and UK. Thankfully not everybody is as complacent as the UK and US governments in seeking to end this human rights abuse. While Gulnara has been posting pictures of herself in suggestive Yoga postures on Twitter, and telling the world how she does not eat meat, only chicken and fish, Andrew Stroehlein has been questioning her country's record, as Uzbekistan's envoy to the UN, on torture, the Andijan massacre of April 2005, child labour, lack of freedom of expression and a whole host of other serious abuses that are not going to go away. So perhaps when she's meditating after her next Yoga session, she can meditate on some of those issues.

Breaking news on McCormac culpability

Follow @JohnPlatinumG Satire is something that Americans are not so sure about and transatlantic humour is pretty much a hit and miss affair. So I hope my friends in the US are able to separate the satire from the obvious truth of this video. It features Billy McCormac, a PR consultant and advisor to Sweden's Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, and Karl Rove who also advised Reinfeldt but is more famous for rigging George W. Bush's election 'victory'. Without this man we might not have had the war in Iraq and all the other post Bush wars. Karl Rove is the personification of evil. Even today an innocent former governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman, is in prison because Rove, through his former wife's contacts in the US judiciary, got him incarcerated by a 'bent' judge.

I am proud of the research that went into this cartoon. Billy McCormac is quite well-known in Sweden where he has lived since 1995. Nothing was known about him prior to his arrival in Sweden. He is now an executive of Prime PR. This set me thinking. CIA? Something to hide? Shame? All these? What? One thing was certain from the start. He knows all the right people and is probably Sweden's main political commentator on US politics. As well as being an advisor to Reinfeldt he was a senior consultant in a former PR company JKL, the blog of which which closed in 2006. There is a photo of him with Karl Rove and Fredrik Andersson and it is almost certain that he was instrumental in arranging introductions for Rove when Rove went over to Sweden to give Reinfeldt his electorial expertise. While vote-rigging is thought to be the domain of dictatorships in less developed countries Rove rigged the election which got George W. Bush illegally to power. It was the biggest crime of the new century.

What puzzled me was McCormac's ancestry. There appeared to be nothing about his life in the USA.It was not until I discovered that there was a Billy Murray McCormac, a nuclear scientist who died in 1999, and who had left children, one called Billy McCormac II, that things began to make sense. With further checking I discovered that a Billy McCormac II had made donations to the Democratic National Services Corporation, one of $1000 in 2009 and another also $1000 this year. You need to type his name into the appropriate box. This facility no longer works for me. However I photographed the link with stem details before it went down.

I therefore suggest that the reason there is no history for the Prime PR executive is because his father was responsible for creating the massive hole in the ozone layer that sits over Australia and the Pacific with his upper atmosphere nuclear tests in 1962. This was the biggest crime of the old century. It might be noticed that testing took place as far away from the US as geographically possible. What it is the US, and the McCormacs, have against Australia I really don't know. Billy McCormac senior left them with no protection from the sun's deadly rays. Billy McCormac junior is trying to get the best export Australia has given us in decades banged up in a US Supermax prison for exposing US war and torture crimes. And still the Aussies kiss the arse of Uncle Sam. Some things are inexplicable.

Good news and bad news

Follow @JohnPlatinumG Good news

On the day that Barack Obama was re-elected to the White House here is an item of good news. A very reasonably-priced book has just been released on-line covering the case of Julian Assange in Sweden. The author is Guy Sims and it covers what really happened in Sweden. Most details have been quite widely available in Swedish for months but because the Zionist-owned media in England and America will not allow the publication of certain names connected with the case, including Anna Ardin, Sofia Wilen and Irmeli Krans it is a blessing to have the real facts in English at last. I bought a copy and read the first 50 pages enthralled by the absurdity of the accusations, the attempt by Anna Ardin to pervert the course of justice by removing pertinent tweets to how much she enjoyed the company of Julian Assange, and also the deletion of her paper on how to get revenge on men who dump a woman.

The reader learns that first Anna Ardin said she never had sex with Julian Assange. Then she said she did have consensual sex with Julian Assange. Then, several days later, having arranged a crayfish party in his honour, at which party she tweeted how cool it was (one of the tweets she deleted) she accused Assange of having raped her the night before the crayfish party she arranged for him. If she did not make this up herself she was convinced to accuse Assange by her friend Irmeli Krans and other officers at the police station. Irmeli Krans, a friend of Ms Ardin's for some two years prior to the women reporting Assange at the same police station at which Irmeli Krans worked at a time when Krans was on duty. Krans in fact interviewed Sofia Wilen and later made attempts to embellish or spice up the original statement, which Wilen would not sign. I covered some of this in an earlier post. I cannot understand why members of the Swedish prosecution and police service are not on trial for attempting to pervert the course of justice. But there are many things in this bad, bad world I have difficulty understanding, Nevertheless it is good new that this book is available in English and I urge you all to read it.

Bad news

It is with sadness that I have to report the death last Friday of Brian Spencer. Brian was one of the long-time campaigners for justice over the death of Dr David Kelly, the weapons' inspector over whose demise so many questions remain. I never met Brian but I am sure he was a good man. We have been in touch by Facebook and email for the last two years. His legacy is the most comprehensive blog on the minutiae of what happened to Dr Kelly, where the conflicts are, and where the conflicts of interest are. It contains numerous statements and is well worth not just a perusal but a study.

This is one of Brian's last comments on a Dr David Kelly website made on 28 September.

'The more complicated a cover up becomes and the more people get involved then the more likely mistakes will become apparent. This has happened with the Dr Kelly cover up.

Mr McGinty from the Attorney General's Office penned Annexes TVP 1-6 which are on the AG's website. He effectively derided the written and oral evidence of searcher Louise Holmes who stated that she went back to her car whilst fellow searcher Paul Chapman took DC Coe and his two companions in the direction of the wood where the body lay. McGinty's version was that the searchers met the three officers at the foot of Harrowdown Hill and that DC Shields and the unidentified third officer stayed behind with Louise Holmes.

Dr Richard Shepherd was commissioned to report on the pathological evidence and in a section about the alleged movement of the body wrote: 'The police officers (DCs Coe and Shields) who initially attended the scene commented that the body was "laying on his back", they did not describe sitting or slumping against a tree.'

So McGinty has Shields down at the bottom of the track and thus half a mile from the body. At the same time Shepherd has Shields with Coe attending the body. They can't both be right!'

 He further commented on comments to this post on Tuesday. Just over a month later he died, a campaigner to the end. Although he did not live to see justice in the Kelly case he fought for it. Others will continue with the struggle inspired by Brian's example.

Breaking News on Julian Assange

Follow @JohnPlatinumG I can’t see it being long now before Julian Assange is walking free. Today a Swedish newspaper, Expressen, has published an article which claims that Anna Ardin (though she is not mentioned by name) was friends with a police interrogator on the Assange case. Expressen was the newspaper that first broke the story of Assange’s arrest, so it can hardly be considered pro-Assange.

This is a big turning point in my opinion. Especially since the two women who went to the police station together, appear to have gone at the beginning of this interrogator’s shift. You can almost smell the sweet aromas of a woman to woman phone call before the Anna and Sofia arrived at the police station to be interviewed by a friend of one of them. Only somebody with a passing interest in this case, someone who has been catching all the endless snippets of the words ‘rape’ and ‘Assange’ in the same sentence, can be naive enough to believe there is any credibility to this concocted sex scandal. They are all in the same Social Democratic Party, and this brings us to what chance of a fair trial would Assange have in Sweden? I quote from one of the best accounts of the Assange case regarding secret trials in Sweden.

 “Even in this relatively enlightened country, human sexuality is a subject fraught with deep and often subconscious feelings of guilt and shame. “Prosecution witnesses need not worry about other witnesses coming forward to refute their evidence, because their evidence will not be heard in public.” Most of those stories involve the treatment of men accused of sex crimes. It is one of the dark corners of Swedish society that seldom sees the light — most likely because, even in this relatively enlightened country, human sexuality is a subject fraught with deep and often subconscious feelings of guilt and shame.

 But jurists and other interested parties with direct experience of sex-related cases have become increasingly alarmed by what appears to be a systematic bias that often leads to bizarre and tragic judgements. There are several reasons for this, one being that trials for sex crimes are almost invariably held behind closed doors. “This tradition grew up a long time ago, before the [Second World] war, to prevent the press reporting ‘immoral’ evidence, and was later advanced to protect the privacy of complainants and defendants,” notes one of Assange’s Swedish lawyers, who further explains that his client, “… notwithstanding the avalanche of publicity damaging to him about the prosecution case, will be tried in secret and the public will not be aware of any exposure in the courtroom of the weakness of that case.

Prosecution witnesses need not worry about other witnesses coming forward to refute their evidence, because their evidence will not be heard in public.” Further, “The trial will be heard by a judge and three laypersons who sit with him or her. The three laypersons, appointed by political parties, are often members of the parties that appoint them.… I should add that the danger caused by media prejudice is also present at the court of appeal level, where the hearings will again be in secret.”

 Last night Newsnight presenter Gavin Esler and Independent on Sunday columnist Joan Smith almost jumped down Craig Murray’s throat for mentioning Anna Ardin, one of the two women who sought to expose Julian Assange as a sexual deviant. But the truth is her name, and that of her co-conspirator, Sofia Wilén, have been in the public domain for two years. What the media do not want is people searching the internet to find out the truth. The truth is becoming something alien to the media. That is why they want to gag Julian Assange. It is why they want to gag Craig Murray. Ironically it is two years today since Assange was set free on the same charges of which they say he needs to answer questions now.