Partner at Firm Counseling Assange's Accusers Helped the CIA In Rendition for Torture
By Andrew Kreig (about the author)Spy thriller author Thomas Bodström, name partner in the law firm representing the two Swedish women making the notorious sex charges against WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, knows better than most people that truth is stranger than fiction.
As Sweden's Minister of Justice, Bodström helped his nation in 2001 secretly turn over to the Central Intelligence Agency two asylum-seekers suspected by the CIA of terror.
This is based on materials recently obtained by my Justice Integrity Project and by Legal Schnauzer blogger Roger Shuler, who broke a big part of the story earlier today here on OpEd News. We cooperated in the research. As an advisory, my piece below overlaps but is longer and provides more links to core documents for those who might want to become active on the threats we're facing.
Thomas Bodström by Wikipedia
The CIA flew the terror suspects to Egypt for torture as part of rendition efforts requiring secret, high-level Swedish cooperation.
Assange is the subject of a recent global manhunt by Swedish authorities seeking him for sex questioning. The United States is investigating him intensely for spy-related suspicions but without known charges yet. But he can take only cold comfort that Sweden eventually awarded the 2001 asylum seekers damages for torture.
On Jan. 11, Assange's attorneys spoke of their fears that if Great Britain sends their client to Sweden to Sweden for an inquiry on sex charges he could end up being sent by Sweden to the United States on spy charges. There, the defense lawyers said, Assange could face death or imprisonment at Guantanamo in Cuba, where the Bush and Obama administrations hold so-called terrorists almost indefinitely with minimal due process protections.
As a parallel development, the Obama administration has used the disclosures as rationale for a wide-ranging crackdown not simply against WikiLeaks but against others in government or the media, particularly the web-based media, who might disclose secrets that the government regards as threatening national security. Our project summarized these developments this week in a column, "Whistleblower Says: Obama's DoJ Declares War on Whistleblowers."
WikiLeaks Questions
Bodström left his parliament seat last fall to move to the United States for six months, citing a need for family time and to write another book.
Is Bodström again cooperating with U.S. authorities in their all-out effort to save the United States, Sweden -- and perhaps Bodström himself -- from further embarrassment caused by cables that WikiLeaks might release from its still-secret trove?
Or are Swedish authorities proceeding normally, as they claim, in launching a global Interpol manhunt to capture Assange to question him about precisely how and why he engaged in sex-without-a-condom last summer with two women who invited him separately to stay with them in their beds while he was on a speaking tour?
Whatever the case, Bodström's role in being a name partner at the two-person firm initiating the sex claims -- which are not yet criminal charges -- inevitably bring scrutiny upon his motives, background and law partner Claes Borgström, a prominent feminist and, like Bodström, a former official in the Social Democratic Party. Borgström has said he initiated the complaints.
Update: Claes Borgström of Borgström and Bodström wrote me today that this column should reflect that he, not Bodström, represents the two women involved in the Assange matter. At least in the United States and with a small firm, a client is usually ascribed to a firm both in common parlance and for certain formal purposes, such as conflict-of-interest checks. But the original headline is being adjusted to avoid confusion. Other updates to this story are below in the comment section.
Lawyers for Assange made news Jan. 11 by saying their client could be "detained at Guantanamo Bay" or subject to the death penalty if he is extradited from Britain to Sweden, which could lead to extradition or "illegal rendition" to the U.S. The lawyers issued the statement, according to a Huffington Post report, as the WikiLeaks founder appeared in a U.K. court to schedule his extradition hearing for questioning in Sweden over alleged sex crimes.
It's not just Assange and his attorneys who fear trumped-up charges against Assange. Critics in Sweden are saying that their government has been jeopardizing their country's hard-won reputation for political neutrality and human rights. In November, Sweden's parliament announced that it would probe U.S. embassy surveillance of Swedish citizens revealed by WikiLeaks and its media partners.
Political Prosecutions At Home and Abroad
The legal reform project I founded last year got its start investigating the kinds of political prosecutions that became notorious in the United States during the Bush administration in 2007. The scandal arose from revelations that the Justice Department purged nine U.S. attorneys for political reasons the previous year, an unprecedented mid-term event.
The conventional wisdom is that the prosecutions were a temporary aberration, perhaps encouraged out of partisan zeal by then-White House advisor Karl Rove before he resigned in mid-2007. But our research has concluded that political interference in the justice system is a serious, longstanding problem blighting both parties and largely ignored by such watchdog institutions as the traditional news media.
The probe of Assange on both sex and spy charges shows how political prosecutions dishonor other nations as well, and carry the potential for undermining web-based news distribution systems that currently provide one of best hopes for citizen oversight of government abuse of power.
Last week, our project published a Connecticut Watchdog column headlined, "Rove Suspected of Role In Swedish WikiLeaks Probe." Rove has long advised Sweden's governing Moderate Party and is well-positioned as a White House veteran to counsel leaders about the political and media dimensions on the capture of the nomadic Assange.
The column attracted widespread readership and follow-ups, including internationally, because of Rove's reputation. The column also attracted several conservative critics, who said Rove's statement on his website bio that he has advised Sweden's governing Moderate Party does not prove that he has advised Prime Minister Fredric Reinfeldt or his administration about WikiLeaks and that Rove and Bush are so disliked in Sweden that no major politician would risk the association.
Failing to receive a response from Rove for reaction, I hosted Jan. 6 one of his longtime friends, Timbro Media Institute Executive Director Roland P. Martinsson, on my "Washington Update" public affairs radio show. Martinsson, who heads Scandinavia's leading conservative, free-market think tank, called for Assange's arrest and said there's no evidence Rove is involved with Reinfeldt or WikiLeaks.
Prof. Brian Palmer of Uppsala University, a Reinfeldt biographer and a source for Reinfeldt's links to Rove, is the scheduled guest Jan. 13 on the show, which can be heard live at noon (ET) worldwide or by archive later on the My Technology Lawyer radio network. Listener and dial-in question information is available on the show's www.MyTechnologyLawyer.com/update" target="_hplink">website.
What follow are other reports drawn from the public record about irregularities in the Assange prosecutions. The paint a picture suspiciously like the leaks and strange charges arising in some of the more infamous political prosecutions in the United States of recent years. But, as ever, this is only a step along the way in investigating what really happened.
The Accusers' Lawyer
Let's start with Bodström's bio from Wikipedia, which also provides the photo at top:
Thomas Lennart Bodström is a Swedish politician and member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. He was the Swedish Minister for Justice in the two last succeeding governments of the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, from 2000 to 2006. Since October 2006 until October 2010 he was the chairman of the Riksdags committee for juridical issues....Bodström is the son of Lennart Bodström, Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs 1982-1985 in the Olof Palme government. In his youth, however, Thomas Bodström was not involved in party politics. Instead, his first brush with media attention came as a football player... He took interest in international affairs and in 1999 he joined the board of the Swedish branch of the international organisation Lawyers Without Borders.
His role in the CIA rendition of two terror subjects in 2001 has become controversial in Sweden after United Nations and Swedish officials began issuing reports. For example, an English-language Swedish news organization called The Local reported in 2006, "Sweden broke torture ban during CIA deportation."
"Swedish officials just looked on while US agents mistreated Mohammad Alzery, along with fellow Eyptian Ahmed Agiza, at Stockholm's Bromma Airport," according to the news report. "This very serious indeed for Sweden," said Anna Wigenmark, a lawyer at human rights group the Swedish Helsinki Committee, who represented Alzery at the UN."
Who's To Blame?
Bodström has long minimized this role authorizing the 2001 rendition. He and former Prime Minister Göran Persson have said that decision-making was a group-effort, with the key choices made by then-Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, who was assassinated in 2003. Bodström said that he only became aware of CIA involvement Jan. 7, 2002 at a meeting with the then head of the security police, Säpo.
But Lindh's friend and former communications director Eva Franchell wrote "The Friend," a 2009 book that implicated Bodström and Persson. According to press reports in 2009, Franchell wrote that Bodström learned about the rendition at the same time as her late boss, Dec. 17, the day before they occurred. Franchell's book also said the United States was threatening Sweden with heavy trade sanctions unless her nation complied with the rendition.
Even accepting Bodström's defense, his government's overall cooperation with renditions undercuts claims by Sweden's establishment that its justice system is immune from political pressure, including from the United States.
Instead, those who delve into those matters can see a pattern of human rights and neutrality rhetoric that coexists with behind-the-scenes battles over whether the nation would live up to such aspirations.
For example, a start-up group Stop NATO Sweden last year published a white paper, "From Neutrality to NATO." It documented how leaders of major parties in Sweden have been supporting the U.S.-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in ways incompatible with Sweden's neutrality traditions.
In December, a Swedish medical school professor and noted human rights advocate wrote a hard-hitting column, "Assange Buried the Swedish Neutrality Myth." Dr. Marcello Vittorio Ferrada-Noli wrote that Sweden can no longer enjoy the image "of a modern, independent, democratic and non-aligned country" because of WikiLeaks, and therefore is embarked on what he called "revenge."
His next column Jan. 11 was headlined, "The Swedish political crusade against Assange and WikiLeaks." It argued that Bodström's law firm initiated the questionable sex charges that obscured Bodstrom's dealings with U.S. authorities, as well as scandalous sellouts by officials since then of Swedish business interests.
The debate over the validity of Sweden's sex crime investigation has been debated in many quarters, but is most conveniently framed by an exchange of open letters last month between filmmaker Michael Moore and a Swedish defender of his country's sex crime investigative procedures.
Next Steps
The ending of this thriller is not yet in sight. Without the power of subpoena, we can only advance the plot incrementally by bringing forward new material about the saga. Our project has attempted to contact the lawyers without success for comment. We shall continue such efforts and will provide updates here.
In the meantime, one has to wonder why the lawyers' backgrounds in such a world-famous case aren't more widely known, at least in the United States. The background is all public.
Is there something boring about a handsome, best-selling author, former football star like Bodström, who served as one of Europe's top legal officials and is now embroiled in major international sex scandal and political intrigue? What if the scandal ultimately threatens to restrict the world's whistleblowers, reporters and their readers from learning what's in government documents?
Andrew Kreig is executive director of the Justice Integrity Project, a Washington, DC-based non-profit organization focused on reforming abusive federal investigative procedures. He is an attorney, non-profit executive and investigative (more...)The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.