Gaddafi, Scanlan, & Julian (And Those Pesky SIPDIS-tagless cables)

Picking up on the conspiracy theory put forward by Iran’s leadership, which holds that the leaked U.S. diplomatic cables were released by the C.I.A. to undermine anti-colonialist governments, Colonel Qaddafi warned his listeners about the dark designs of “WikiLeaks which publishes information written by lying ambassadors in order to create chaos.”

And from the Grauniad:

5.03pm: Cables published by the Swedish press have disclosed that the US made efforts to get two Swedish companies - Colenco and Mahacos - from working with Iran on civilian nuclear reactors.

2.45pm: Gregg Mitchell at the Nation reports that Norway's Aftenposten, which was leaked a set of the cables, has shared its cache with more media organisations. Die Welt, the German paper, has been named and there are three more to come, a contact at the paper tells him.

The Aftenposten set has also been shared with Politilken in Denmark, Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden and the Dutch broadcaster RTL and newspaper NRC Handelsblad, as mentioned below.

Keen readers may note that Assange has also said he gave the cables to the Dutch pair referenced to above..

Question: what links Muammar Gaddafi and Teresa Scanlan, winner of Miss America 2011? The answer is they both made strong statements over the weekend against WikiLeaks.

Gaddafi blamed the Tunisia uprising on cables written by "ambassadors in order to create chaos". In answer to a question on WikiLeaks at the pageant, Scanlan, who (more conventionally) also played the piano and wore a bikini, said the release of the cables "was actually based on espionage, and when it comes to the security of our nation, we have to focus on security first and then people's right to know."

Nice.  No frickin rocket scientist her

PS

Must leave 'em all scratching their heads.

While they must be able to sense that something funny is happening, their luck runs out there.

This is because logic is not necessarily in play.

It may be part of the battle for the unconscious mind.

Or it may be shimmer.

Speaking of shimmer, French intel indicates that Mrs. Ben Ali decamped from Tunisia with 1.5 tons of gold - probably in late 2010 as they were getting their ducks in a row.

Seal that Year w/ POMOnanigans & Hubris

Late to the party here.  I knew that you had been calling BS on McFizzle and saying that there is serious AQ over there (from your connections), but I just discovered that you (we) nailed the specific plot.

See M1 tweet of 2:07 AM Dec 13th.

It was out there for anybody to see, yet nobody but us called it.

There is nothing better than the SMC-op.  Others may compete, but nobody does what we do.  Really.

They love us.  (Ho, ho, ho).

Sense & Svensk Ability: Metaphors Abound

This Friday's edition of Whiskey Break!™ was brought to this fair clan by an intrepid though mysterious fellow who shall remain unnamed yet much appreciated.

OPERATION: BIG MACK ATTACK
DATE: 2009:09:23T00:00:00.000 UTC-01:00:00H
DURATION: 48:00:00H
ASSET: XXXXXXXXX
DEPARTURE: STOCKHOLM
ARRIVAL: AMSTERDAM
CARGO: CLASSIFIED, "EYES ONLY"
TARGET: XXXXXXXXX
OP-OUT: T

Mackmyra is Sweden's first and fine entry into the single malt brewing regime. A golden nectar that oil-slips 'cross tongue; the liquid, languid and wan, verily wafts through thorax. A trail of chest warmth lingers as if to reassure.

So, yeah. Pretty good stuff. We here at Whiskey Break!™ were in firm agreement. Perhaps lacking the depth of flavor of a healthy Scotch, the finish of this single malt is superb.

And then one day, the depth will come. After all, the Swedes only started distilling whiskey in 1999. One wonders what wonders are too follow. Naturally, the Whiskey Break!™ had to make the trek back to Sweden, and take up arms to those Swedes! Damn you! How do you get this good, this fast?!

Ain' t Dat Be Da' Damnedest Of Thangz (Love this sh*t); We're but IO

Pieces of some puzzle fallin' into place.

It is not the family's first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah's cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Res ipsa loquitur.



...and now for ramblings as can only be born of arrogance:

While haphazardly still at it: a generic H/T piled upon trap-shruggin' ZenPundit. He be a Sickago-Boy - but he be not as bad as such creature deservedly's cut out to be.

And lest we forget ( per some peversely recondite way) - SMC was metrosexually hyper-lauded by a major Skankinavian radio station. Station's pubatorial chattering vassals had nothing but solid praise to heap upon our pickled arses - and per transitive property of inequality...your sorry voyeuristic arse too.

Anyways: amidst all this coincidental deification of meatballian wisdom - the local pheasant-gazing and, at that, mongoloidian embassy "economic analyst" reported nothing worse/better in his morning briefing to ambassador retardo de jour than that the skanky radio bandits unequivocably labelled us as..."incredibly cool".

Public diplomacy at its Zenith. (Yuck, goddammit - We're all IO).

Core men up front

(Run MountainRunner run.)

A Bite Into A Void

Not quite our most immediate of bags, but if we stretch the envelope of what domestic insurgency can be about - and its triggers...

A banking system in crisis after the collapse of a housing bubble. An economy hemorrhaging jobs. A market-oriented government struggling to stem the panic. Sound familiar?

It does to Sweden. The country was so far in the hole in 1992 -- after years of imprudent regulation, short-sighted economic policy and the end of its property boom -- that its banking system was, for all practical purposes, insolvent.

But Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. And Swedish officials say there are lessons from their own nightmare that Washington may be missing.

Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing cheques. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government. That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well. "If I go into a bank," said Bo Lundgren, who was Sweden's finance minister at the time, "I'd rather get equity so that there is some upside for the taxpayer." Sweden spent four per cent of its gross domestic product, or 65 billion kronor (RM33.7 billion) , the equivalent of US$11.7 billion at the time, or US$18.3 billion in today's dollars, to rescue ailing banks. That is slightly less, proportionate to the national economy, than the US$700 billion, or roughly five per cent of gross domestic product, that the Bush administration estimates its own move will cost in the United States.

But the final cost to Sweden ended up being less than two per cent of its GDP. Some officials say they believe it was closer to zero, depending on how certain rates of return are calculated.
The tumultuous events of the last few weeks have produced a lot of tight-lipped nods in Stockholm. Lundgren even made the rounds in New York in early September, explaining what the country did in the early 1990s.

A few American commentators have proposed that the US government extract equity from banks as a price for their rescue. But it does not seem to be under serious consideration yet in the Bush administration or Congress.

The reason is not quite clear. The government has already swapped its sovereign guarantee for equity in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance institutions, and the American International Group, the global insurance giant.

Putting taxpayers on the hook without anything in return could be a mistake, said Urban Backstrom, a senior Swedish finance ministry official at the time. "The public will not support a plan if you leave the former shareholders with anything,"

The Swedish crisis had strikingly similar origins to the American one, and its neighbors, Norway and Finland, were hobbled to the point of needing a government bailout to escape the morass as well.

Financial deregulation in the 1980s fed a frenzy of real estate lending by Sweden's banks, which did not worry enough about whether the value of their collateral might evaporate in tougher times.

Property prices imploded. The bubble deflated fast in 1991 and 1992. A vain effort to defend Sweden's currency, the krona, caused overnight interest rates to spike at one point to 500 per cent. The Swedish economy contracted for two consecutive years after a long expansion, and unemployment, at three per cent in 1990, quadrupled in three years.

After a series of bank failures and ad hoc solutions, the moment of truth arrived in September 1992, when the government of Prime Minister Carl Bildt decided it was time to clear the decks.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the opposition centre-left, Bildt's conservative government announced that the Swedish state would guarantee all bank deposits and creditors of the nation's 114 banks. Sweden formed a new agency to supervise institutions that needed recapitalisation, and another that sold off the assets, mainly real estate, that the banks held as collateral.

Sweden told its banks to write down their losses promptly before coming to the state for recapitalization. Facing its own problem later in the decade, Japan made the mistake of dragging this process out, delaying a solution for years.

Then came the imperative to bleed shareholders first. Lundgren recalls a conversation with Peter Wallenberg, at the time chairman of SEB, Sweden's largest bank. Wallenberg, the scion of the country's most famous family and steward of large chunks of its economy, heard that there would be no sacred cows.

The Wallenbergs turned around and arranged a recapitalization on their own, obviating the need for a bailout. SEB turned a profit the following year, 1993.

"For every krona we put into the bank, we wanted the same influence," Lundgren said. "That ensured that we did not have to go into certain banks at all."

By the end of the crisis, the Swedish government had seized a vast portion of the banking sector, and the agency had mostly fulfilled its hard-nosed mandate to drain share capital before injecting cash. When markets stabilized, the Swedish state then reaped the benefits by taking the banks public again.

More money may yet come into official coffers. The government still owns 19.9 per cent of Nordea, a Stockholm bank that was fully nationalized and is now a highly regarded giant in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea region.

The politics of Sweden's crisis management were similarly tough-minded, though much quieter.

Soon after the plan was announced, the Swedish government found that international confidence returned more quickly than expected, easing pressure on its currency and bringing money back into the country. The centre-left opposition, while wary that the government might yet let the banks off the hook, made its points about penalising shareholders privately.

"The only thing that held back an avalanche was the hope that the system was holding," said Leif Pagrotzky, a senior member of the opposition at the time. "In public we stuck together 100 per cent, but we fought behind the scenes."

-- NYT

Follow up:

A recent IMF study [80-page pdf] of 42 systemic banking crises across the world provides evidence on how different crises were resolved.

Ho Ho Ho IO - Maritime Meatballs

Awareness of IO in the shape of deception-/influence-ops (and other PSYOP-ishness) might reasonably be perceived as a rather pertinent knowledge-set for that discerning consumer of news still wary of those special narratives that intermittently pop up and come to ubiquitously permeate the exhaust fumes of every lo-hairlined tele-prompted head intensely willing to console one come dinner time with sponsored clarity on why the world will always turn for yet another day of credit fueled eudaimonia.

Providing an example of a recent IO and how it's resultant narrative was successfully deployed against a targeted public, and leveraged against its leadership, would perhaps not be considered completely out of order given the esoteric contextualizing going on at this site of dubious repute. For some of our regulars, what follows will be but foggy old news. Verily, it is for these bored and lonely degenerates we provide a meager feed of complimentary skankwork.

In varying contrast to the generic authoritarian state, Western democracies are not seldom at somewhat of an initial loss when attempting to adequately control the mass media to shape the perceptions of their citizens when delicate need so demands. In such lieu, the creation of ‘false realities’ has proven to be one of several workable alternatives to the more direct avenues of influence readily available to those most fortunate despots of Myanmar et al.

By manipulating/tailoring events to be appetizing to a rather divinable media, political/soft control of targeted nations becomes, albeit only at fortunate times, a not altogether unachievable goal. To such ends, well-heeled powers will on occasion aim to create indicators – enemy subs or bomb attacks or whatever – though most often dazzling or salacious events to be sure, that are odds-on seized upon by the regularized and unflappable diligentsia of Dorito media for Cheezy-dimensional interpretation and dissemination to the publics targeted for perception shaping - be they of foreign or domestic persuasion.

After World War II, a real hot war in Western Europe appeared increasingly unlikely. Power struggles in democratic countries found new forms at the lower end of the conflict spectrum. In defense of the Western system, the US began to operate submarines to simulate real enemy intrusions into the waters of allies and friends as an instrument to test their readiness and capability - but also to manipulate the mindset of local military forces, governments and populations, as was the case in Sweden.

Following the stranding of a Soviet Whiskey-class submarine in 1981 in a Swedish archipelago, a series of massive submarine intrusions took place within Swedish waters and were widely attributed to Soviet intrusions. Soon the kingdom of Sweden was on high alert for Spetznaz frogmen everywhere (Robert Boyd got it wrong here, save perhaps for his 'probably'). However, the evidence for these Soviet intrusions appears to have been manipulated or simply invented. Classified documents and interviews point to covert Western, rather than Soviet, activity.

Archival material and interviews with retired military officers point to US and to some extent UK PSYOPs. Former US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger stated on Swedish TV that US/Western submarines operated regularly and frequently in Swedish waters after Swedish-US navy-to-navy consultations. However, the Swedish government or public was never informed. They believed the submarines were from the Soviet Union. These operations allowed the U.S. to shape the mindset of their targeted audience in order to control a state perceived to be wavering on its kinetic commitments.

As the United States and Britain ran a 'secret war' in Swedish waters, the number of Swedes perceiving the Soviet Union as a direct threat increased from 5-10 per cent in 1980 to 45 per cent in 1983. This Anglo-American 'secret war' aimed at exerting political influence over Sweden was a risky enterprise but perhaps one of the most successful covert operations of the entire Cold War.

Viciously hacked & jacked book review of Ola Tunander's The Secret War Against Sweden: US and British Submarine Deception in the 1980's

Winning The Right War

The Brookings Institute has been kind enough to retrieve a new article on the "War on Terror" by one of their Senior Fellows from behind the paid firewall of The International Institute For Strategic Studies.

Never ones to fail to take advantage of an exploit, we hereby present an excerpt (and more valuably -- a link).

From Winning the Right War by Philip H. Gordon (30-page pdf):

Bush ... argues that, even though the terrorists hate freedom, it is the lack of freedom in their own countries that drives them to support terror­ism. The picture painted is thus one of some fixed set of ‘evildoers’, driven to terrorism by the absence of democracy in their homelands, who attack America and its allies because they hate the freedoms symbolised by those countries. As a basis for understanding – and therefore dealing with – the terrorist threat, this is a partial and exceedingly misleading explanation.

The idea that terrorists attack because they hate freedom is particularly mis­guided. The explanation is convenient, because it suggests that there is nothing we can do about it (since they hate ‘who we are’ rather than ‘what we do’), and it is harmful because it suggests that the only way to defeat such terrorists is to kill or capture them all, since we’re obviously not prepared to sacrifice our freedom to appease them. But there is little evidence to suggest that hatred of freedom is in fact a primary cause of terrorism, and much to suggest that it is not.

At the most superficial level, if freedom were the main target for terror­ists, they would be just as likely to attack Switzerland, Canada, Costa Rica or Sweden as the United States, which is clearly not the case. Indeed, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt have been much more frequent targets of attacks than the United States, and it is surely not because the terrorists hate the individual liber­ties and elected governments in those countries.

Extensive polling in the Muslim world also challenges the notion of a sig­nificant link between terrorism and a hatred for freedom. While many Islamist ideologues do often express revulsion with the personal liberties and sexual freedom enjoyed in Western countries, it turns out that even most of the Muslims who support terrorism and trust Osama bin Laden favour elected government, personal liberty, educational opportunity and economic choice. Some Muslim extremists may not like American-style democracy, but that is not why they become terrorists, and not why others support them.

(...)

Even to the degree that stable democracy is part of the longer-term solu­tion to the terrorist problem, there remains the problem of how to promote it. Democracy seems to be the long-term trend among states based on historic national communities in Europe, North America and Latin America, but it is much harder to install where no strong ‘nation’ exists, which is sadly the case for most of the Muslim world. Only Iran, Turkey, Egypt and possibly Indonesia really meet the nationhood criterion, and even these countries are plagued by serious ethnic and religious divisions. Certainly Iraq – with artificial borders, diverse ethnic and religious groups, and unevenly dispersed natural resources – is not promising terrain for the establishment of democracy, notwithstanding the claims of some of the most prominent supporters of the war. In the long run, it is possible to imagine that economic development, social modernisation, a patient process of institution building, and more equitable distribution of resources among different ethnic, religious and social groups might create the conditions necessary for democracy to develop. But a counteterrorism strategy based on such uncertainties – the uncertain link between an absence of democ­racy and terrorism as well as the uncertainty that democracy can be implanted where the right conditions are not in place – will have very limited prospects for success.

(...)

The perception of foreign occupation of Muslim lands also seems to contrib­ute to terrorists’ decisions to carry out attacks. In fact, as scholar Robert Pape has demonstrated, suicide bombers are far more often motivated by a desire to fight against foreign military occupation and for self-determination rather than by a desire to promote democracy at home. Looking at Tamil, Palestinian, Chechen, and al-Qaeda suicide bombers, Pape found that what they most had in common was a perception that their communities were being humiliated by more power­ful outsiders, and that they could reverse that humiliation by inflicting pain on those countries and obliging them to withdraw.

None of this means that the United States should simply change its poli­cies to make potential terrorists happy. But to deny any link between political context and an individual’s decision to become a terrorist, or to wilfully mis­place blame on a vague hatred for freedom or lack of democracy, is to start the ‘war on terror’ with a huge disadvantage. It is hard to fight an enemy without being honest about its real nature.

(...)

There is nothing easy about confronting the murderous threat posed by Islamist extremists who use violence to achieve political goals. The Bush administra­tion’s ‘war on terror’ is failing, however, not only because the job is inherently difficult but because the president launched the wrong war. He misconstrued the nature of the threat, placed too much faith in the use of military force, paid too little attention to the importance of moral authority and ideological combat, conflated a diverse array of threats into a single monolith, failed to appreciate the importance of winning and maintaining friends and allies, and failed to supply the necessary resources for the kind of war he chose to fight.

In my book Winning the Right War, I argue that an alternative course of action is both possible and necessary. In such a new approach, the United States and its allies would approach the ‘war on terror’ as a long-term ideological struggle – in some ways like the fight against Communism during the Cold War – that we will win only when we have discredited the extremist ideas of our enemies.

(...)

In fighting the right war along these lines, we would demonstrate confidence that, in the long run, the hateful, repressive ideology we are fighting will collapse, like communism before it. Ultimately, violent Islamism is not likely to win enduring support. Terrorism is not a strategy with which Muslims will forever want to be associated, and it will create a backlash within Muslim societies. With time and experience, and if the United States and its allies make the right choices, Muslims will themselves turn against the extremists in their midst. They will seek to put their civilisation on a path that will restore its greatest era, when the Islamic world was a multicultural zone of tolerance and of intellectual, artistic and scientific achievement. The agents of this change might come from above – leaders fearful of losing their grip on power if they fail to change – or from below – citizens fed up both with secular autocracy and the fundamentalist alternative – but they will come as the inevita­ble if destructive effects of modernisation run their course. Islamist extremism, in other words, will end up on the same ash-heap of history as Communism did, so long as we do not play into the extremists’ hands and artificially prolong its life.

Synchronicity of Refused Refugees and Surging Soldiers: Oil Law Up

The Iraq that considers, signs, and ratifies the so-called Iraq Oil Law must be perceived as an Iraq with reasonably sufficient legitimacy in the eyes of the international community, lest the divvying up of the targeted petro-spoils of war that will come of the ramrodded legislation be peskily challenged down the road and denuded of convenient legal justifications for rallying further force to its defense.

Part and parcel of the frantic legitimizing and normalizing efforts at play (see the Surge) are the public diplomacy thrusts being directed at managing perceptions of Iraq as a reasonably stable and sovereign state.

Sorry, refugees. Nothing personal but you've just been swept up in the maelstrom of something both you and our troops have little say, sway, or pending dividends in; deep business.

Shit out of luck and jolly-well fucked.
-M1

Sweden, the top European destination for refugees from Iraq, will tighten its asylum rules and forcibly deport Iraqis who are denied permission to stay, immigration officials said Friday.

The announcement marked an abrupt change in the relatively lax immigration rules that had made Sweden a safe haven for thousands of Iraqis fleeing the chaos in their homeland.

The Swedes stood out among Europeans for their welcoming attitude to refugees fleeing the bloodshed in Iraq. More than 18,000 Iraqis have arrived in Sweden seeking asylum since 2006, the highest number recorded in Europe.

About 80 percent of asylum applications by Iraqis were approved in Sweden last year, but immigration officials said that number would drop as more stringent rules are enforced.

Previously granted asylum based on the general turmoil in their homeland, Iraqis now must show that they face specific threats of violence if they are sent back, Sweden's Migration Board said.

Previously granted asylum based on the general turmoil in their homeland, Iraqis now must show that they face specific threats of violence if they are sent back, Sweden's Migration Board said.

[C]ritics questioned why the Swedish authorities so suddenly decided to reinterpret existing asylum laws. Vandvik, of the ECRE, said the decision was disappointing, but not unexpected.

European governments are bracing for a massive increase in the ranks of Iraqi asylum-seekers, because refugees in Europe remain a fraction of the nearly 4 million people displaced since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Half of those are trapped inside Iraq, having fled their homes and possessions to avoid daily suicide bombings, roving death squads, abductions and other forms of sectarian violence. The other 2 million have found refuge in neighboring countries, mainly in Syria and Jordan, making Iraqis the largest group among asylum seekers worldwide.
-Excerpt, International Herald Tribune

AND

Soon, she may have to pick up again, if immigration authorities deport her to Iraq - the country she fled after being raped, she says, by a gang member with ties to one of Saddam Hussein's sons.

Muhamed, who last month lost her bid to stay in this country in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, would be one of the very few people the U.S. government has sent back to Iraq in recent years.

Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the Department of Homeland Security "is still trying to develop a procedure" with the Iraqi government on deportations and is reviewing the issue case by case.

The situation confronting Muhamed is two-edged, observers say.

Sending someone to a country at war, especially when the U.S. is involved, is "extremely troubling," said Kareem Shora, national director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Shora said his organization has spoken with the White House about granting Iraqis so-called temporary protected status, meaning they could legally stay in the U.S. until the situation changes in Iraq. But no decision has been made on the proposal, he said.

But not deporting Muhamed to Iraq also could pose problems, because it would mean that the federal government is admitting that the situation in Iraq is dangerous, which runs contrary to the notion that the U.S. military is building a safe democracy, said David Leopold, a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and an expert on immigration from the Mideast.

Muhamed's erratic course started with what could be described as a government-sponsored rape.

Though she was Sunni, Saddam's religion, she would not join the former Iraqi leader's Baath party. She says a member of a gang linked to Odday, one of Saddam's sons, raped her.

Michael A. Newton, acting associate clinical professor of law at Vanderbilt University of Law and an expert on Iraq, said the former Iraqi leader used rape to terrorize his country's citizens for at least a decade beginning in the 1980s. Members of Saddam's government even had business cards that read, "security rapists," Newton said.

Muhamed now speaks slowly because of Bell's palsy brought on by stress. Sitting on a leather sofa in her neat house with Iraqi beads and cloths draped on a coffee table, she refers to the rape obliquely at first - "Something happened." Then she offers piecemeal details.
-Excerpt, Las Vegas Sun

Jeb, Tom & A Frozen Meatball

This time of year the eagle-eyed can usually spot Meatball One binging on Joe's Stone Crabs, Sunday loitering at Nikki Beach, or just worrying about sharks while loitering ankle deep in the waters off of Key Biscayne's Bill Baggs Park. This year however finds Meatball One doing a Jeb Bush, namely secretively floundering about in the mystic Baltic over the holidays.

Governor Jeb Bush and wife have a love affair with the Baltic region and often make highly private, off the radar, and beloved journies to Scandinavia from whence they cruise out of Stockholm through scenic Baltic archipelagos to eventually disembark in the St. Petersburg of their hearts. It appears that word of these pleasantries has spread per whispers and hence Bush-family A#1 fan and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has also given this secret horse trail a run for his money.

As an unexpectedly extended Scandinavian assignment has holidayed Meatball One in on the wrong side of civilized climes he has decided to venture out to an isolated isle in the frozen Baltic for a few stolen days of solitary and internetless vodkatized R&R. Miami must wait.

Merry Christmas all ye Meatballs!

Negro Balls For Meatballs

Up until quite recently, a tasty round confection called a Negro Ball could be bought wherever tasty treats were sold in Sweden. Then out of the blue a few Swedes got to thinking in the tradition of the Enlightenment that perhaps...just perhaps, the nomenclature of Negro Ball might be somewhat disturbing to some of the colored folks residing in Sweden.

Eventually some sort of consensus was reached by most of Sweden's kiosk owners and fund raising Girl Scouts and now for the past 2 years the cherished culinary delight Negro Ball has been marketed more or less as the Coconut Ball.

But when only blond hair and blue eyes are involved in the sales transaction then you can bet your kid's kidneys that a Coconut Ball remains affectionately referred to as nuttin' but a Negro Ball.

Factoid:

A larger percentage of colored folk occupied executive positions during the Apartheid era in South Africa than at present in Sweden.

Powell tells Europe to Shut the Fuck Up.

SMC gave it to you first!

Europe's Meatballs lie through their whining fangs about their complicity, or even tacit knowledge, of covert American kidnapping activities on their most sovereign of territories and now Colin Powell ain't gonna sit idly by and listen to their Euroshit anymore.

If Powell and his Crips are gonna take heat for these rendition and torture antics then they'll take the Eurotrash politicos who sucked their dicks on the deal down with them - and that includes Sweden's very own Göran, Tompan, and Leila.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has suggested that European leaders are pretending to be shocked by news reports America took suspected terrorists to secret prison camps in Europe for interrogation.
Read More!

Terror in the Swedish Heartland

Finally Sweden got its very own al-Qaida attack. Some kid threw a fire cracker at the polling station in Sweden where Iraqi ex-pats were casting their votes for the so-called Iraqi elections.

The prankster declared per anonymous missive (words up that it was written in crayon) that the attack was the dastardly deed of al-Qaida Sweden, a hitherto unheard of entity of terror.

Swedish Meatball media headlined the incident as an al-Qaida attack and now Swedes too can cozy up with the brotherhood of the threatened and beleagured. It feels good to be a part of world events.

So that settles that. The Swedish secret police can now be reassigned and relieved of Vegan spotting duty and protective details like the staking out of high value assets such as openings of new McDonalds franchises and saddle up on tasks that puts the fuzz back on their soy-lattéd balls.

Have bin Beard - Will bin Travel!

When Swedish secret services are prevented from extraditing Swedish citizens at the request of the U.S. authorities they are in deep liason with, they bypass the Swedish judicial system using a variety of tactics, one of which has just come to light.

Swedish secret services conveyed a tip-off to American authorities about a Swedish suspect sought by the CIA and FBI. Swedish law prohibited his extradition to the U.S. due to case specific circumstances among which was the lack of any evidence that met with Swedish legal standards. Upon leaving Sweden on route to Lebanon via Prague, Swedish intelligence notified their American counterparts so that the self-acclaimed bin Laden fan could be nabbed outside of Swedish legal jurisdiction. The dumb-fuck thug was then duly nabbed in transit, albeit by once again undermining Swedish due process.

Now you gotta kinda wonder - do the Swedes have rogue intelligence services or are they in proper cahoots with their official minders? Me thinks it's a bit of both.

I suspect we will see a lot more of this modus operandi now that at least a feigned miniscule of attention has been paid to the CIA rendition operations inside Sweden. However most of this issue's deserved attention has been effectively deflected towards the esoterics of how the Swedish State Department bumbled in administering emergency measures for the the Swedes vacationing in Thailand when the tsunami struck earlier this year.

Saint Enema Day

Just a nod and a wink to the CIA rendition team observed today in Stockholm during the Swedish Lucia celebration - an annual festival of medieval origin, observed on the 13th of December.

On this day, the darkness of The War on Terror was brightened by the CIA's snatch&grab team point man dressed as Saint Lucia, a creature of goodness and light who opened the door to the Christmas season by leading his team out in reverent single file from the U.S. embassy on yet another mission in IKEAland.

On his head, agent Enema One quite convincingly dressed the part of Saint Lucia with his crown of real candles (battery-powered ones would have been a safer option) to give the effect of a halo but forgot to wear the traditional wreath of lingonberry sprigs. Enema One definitely cut a dainty figure in his white, full-length gown with a red ribbon around his waist. His 'female' attendants wore similar gowns and the "star boys" wore white pointy hats decorated with stars.

The procession moved gracefully through the early morning streets outside of the Swedish Parliament and raised few if any eyebrows as they blended most covertly with the other dozen or so more benign Saint Lucia processions criss-crossing the city.

Neither their mark Mohammed Mahmut or the Swedish authorities saw them coming. Only Mohammed and the rendition team knows how they left.

Silent Meatballs, Seditious Meatballs

Oh No, Meatballs!! The Swiss are Spilling the Beans.

Swiss senator Dick Marty who is looking into the scandal for the 46-nation Council of Europe human rights watchdog finds it incredulous that certain governments and secret services in Europe had not cooperated with the CIA -- in breach of their human rights obligations.

If Sweden was flying rendition missions in and out of the U.S., kidnapping Americans and torturing them both stateside and abroad - would you not find it incredible that this could carry on without the U.S. knowing squat diddy about it? And wouldn't you be flabbergasted when U.S. authorities, upon hearing of these Swedish activities, simply dismissed the allegations and showed little interest in exhaustively investigating the matter, let alone showing any dismay whatsoever that their sovereignty had been repeatedly breached?

You´d almost be forgiven for assuming the U.S. knew of, and condoned, the vikings and their pillaging. So what are we to make of matters with the tables turned, with the Americans acting with impunity on Swedish sovereign territory? Are Swedish defenses non-existent, or is it that old sidebar wheeling and dealing behind the back of the electorate all over again? One pleasing narrative de reality for the folks, another hard narrative in the shadows.

What the Swedish eaters don't know won't hurt them. They have their welfare state cradle to coffin perks, safety belts, crash-proof Volvos, and bicycle helmet laws - so why don't they just shut the fuck up, eat another meatball and show a little more gratitude to their hard working yankee doodle minders.

My Meatball in Red, I'm Dancing With You

And yet another Nobel banquet went off without a hitch and Sweden made fine use of its yearly allotment of 3 minutes in the global limelight.

Sweden's answer to Prince Charles´ Camilla - Prime Minister Göran Persson´s secret adoring groupie in the wings (or objet d'squeeze as the French would have it) of the past 15 years (until he finally came clean and broke with his wife a few of moons back) Anitra Steen made a splash at the banquet with the healthiest of appetites thus keeping her evening gown absolutely wrinkle free - the same gown by the way that she wore at last year´s banquet when her luva luva spoke on his cell phone while dining. Oh well, fellow diners were at least lucky he's not a smoker!

Miss Anitra Steen had attended the gala on previous occasion but then kisses had to be stolen in coat rooms and not in front of the King and unwitting wives. Quite the journey from the knuckle dragging mining village of Fagersta to grazing through lax mousse and patés as a knighted nomenklaturesse together with the lowly yet celebrated serfs of the meritocracy. Such be da' perks and sacrifices of being the devoted groupie of apparatchiks.

Sit Down EuroMeatball and Shut the Fuck Up

During WW II, Switzerland's neutrality served the Third Reich well in servicing their heavy need for advanced financial services while Sweden's neutrality provided a most excellent supply of desperately needed raw materials to the Reich's arms industry. Of course this is not the whole picture but a significant part of it.

Sweden's official position during the Cold War was one of non-alliance in peace and neutrality in war. In reality, a kabal within the Swedish government had for better or worse secretly allied Sweden with the U.S. and Nato. The Soviets knew this and the U.S. knew this and everyone´s planning was based on this reality. The only suckers who never knew this were the Swedish populace and their opiners as they proudly defended the wisdom of the official policy in debate after chest thumping debate.

Now good and honest blue eyed folk in Sweden are clamoring for explanations from their elected officials about the plethora of reports of secret CIA flights in and out of the country and their government is feigning indignation (albeit noteworthy in its mildness) and ignorance over these torture shuttles in as much as they've touched down on sovereign Swedish soil. In good show, official-ish reports are conjured up that attempt to ameliorate and align public opinion to the official position of governmental non-involvement in the American system of pan-global rendition. Cute! Just like old times. A phrase I learned in Sweden comes to mind: Same, Same - but different. Geez, I wonder if the terrorists have learned to spell B-L-O-W-B-A-C-K in Swedish yet. You think?


When Condoleeza Rice was faced with the clear allegation that the U.S. is running black sites where people are tortured in Europe and that the U.S. is rendering people in and out of Europe to torture sites all over the world she never denied it. Rice just responded to the Eurotruant indignants with, "it is up to those governments and their citizens to decide if they wish to work with us to prevent terrorist attacks against their own country or other countries." Just because of a few pesky reports out of the Washington Post and Human Rights Watch that have surfaced, Europe's eaters are clamoring and asking their governments what the heck is going on. Rice is now just dutifully reminding every implicated European government figure on the take in this noble snatch and grab business that they went along with this policy once upon a time and that this ain't the time to pee their pants, pander to the electorate, and pull out.

To be perfectly clear, what she's saying to these faux-righteous European leaders that dare cower to the concerns of their incensed electorate is that their countries are already onboard this Gulag-Nouveaux program and they know it so hush the fuck up and sit back down.

Various European government reps including Sweden´s knowingly signed onto this program a good while back. Sure, some deadbeats in respective governments were never made aware about any of these cloak and dagger goodies but that's just playing it by the book. But most certainly each of the 'affected' countries´ intelligence agencies knew exactly what was going on and had the blessings of the few government insiders who were both privy and signatories to the activities.

The moveable feast of the Gulag System is now out of the bag and very public and the U.S. doesn´t bother to deny its existence in the present surreal climate where white is black and state sponsored international kidnapping and torture is termed a cool and mild mannered rendition. Condoleeza Rice just says to the European countries aiding and abetting in the system - like Germany (300+ renditions), the UK (200+), and Sweden (secret numbers as always) - and are insolent enough to now! raise questions about it to shut the fuck up if they want to continue sharing intelligence - cause in any case, "we have the goods on you,... boyz!"

Just recently it's become clear that there were until a few weeks ago secret CIA black sites in the new EU member state Poland (good work Poland!) and Romania (anyone surprised?) where the CIA took people all the while they flew hundreds of flights in to, out of, and turbulence-free through Europe ferrying people to their proprietary secret interrogation sites as well as rendering them to far flung hell holes all over this blue world of ours (I mean of course ours as in the U S of reigning A).

Diana Priest's article in the Washington Post describes how squads of 6 CIA agents dressed in black with masked faces walk up to their rendition targets on the streets in their countries of residence, capture them, cut off their clothes, give them an enema, suit them in diapers, and tie them to the floor of planes that deliver them to destinations in the Gulag network. We don´t know what the CIA sites were like in Poland and Romania and now that Rice is visiting these countries and the EU is all hissy about it, these sites have been quickly shut down and moved to North Africa so the heads of these countries can claim they have no such sites. Again, cute!

To be sure there were also renditions before George W. Bush took office - often in cases when the person was indicted in one country but to where they couldn´t be enticed. However after 911 there was established what has grown to be a 1200 man strong center in the basement of the CIA whose sole purpose is to seize people from anywhere in the world and take them to CIA black sites or to countries that allow torture. Estimates to date are that approx 3000 people have been picked up and transported around in the Gulag system .

Pinochets Operation Condor was a system for picking up people all around South America and transporting them to Chilean torture cells for...yeah, rigtheous torture and sanctifying murder. This is still condsidered one of that fouler components of the Argentine/Chilean dictatorships. So Swedes, what's the difference between the full scope of what you de facto are involved in here and Pinochet's Operation Condor other than that this is perhaps for an even nobler cause?

Many commoners in Sweden are upset that such flights have breached sovereign Swedish territorial boundaries. What might then be even more upsetting to these debutantes of reality will be the realization that their government has actively participated in this game of musical torture chairs. A claim however that their own government hasn´t protected their borders, air space, or own citizens from kidnappings on their orderly streets by foreign rendition teams would be rather mute upon learning of the tacit agreements between their government and the U.S. in these matters. As Condoleeza said in her admonishing oratorical tidbit at Andrews Airforce base last week, "The United States has respected - and will continue to respect - the sovereignty of other countries". And at least in the case of Sweden, she was probably dead on the money.

In other less compliant places however, an Italian magistrate has now indicted 22 CIA officials for kidnapping an Egyptian man off the street and rendering him to Egypt. I don't see that happening any time soon in Sweden. It's just not their style. Hell, the Swedish Air Force isn´t even allowed to fire their American missiles for target practice without written permission and inspection from us! The Swedes live by the same saying I meticulously adhere to when tenderly stirring my tasty meatball tomato sauce - Don't make fucking waves!


And you just gotta know I hate to be the one that querries so but where is the major media in Sweden on the grand picture of Sweden's covert yet diligent involvement in the so-called War on Terror in their capacity as a taciturn eager-beaver-module plugged directly into the U.S. efforts? Could it be that they've all been media-mapped and managed into blind-eyed submission or are there just that many celebrity orgasms to write about?