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Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

583275

Joe Emersberger's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/joeemersberger
Bio: Joe Emersberger was born in 1966 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada where he currently lives and works. He is an engineer and a  member of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union. (More)

All Emersberger Blogs

Is David Allen Green a Rape Apologist?

By Joe Emersberger at Sep 04, 2012


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David Allen Green’s latest effort to explode “myths”

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2012/09/assange-and-legal-myths

about Julian Assange’s case linked to the following article

http://www.swedishwire.com/politics/7497-cia-rendition-flights-stopped-by-swedish-military

which Green cited as evidence that Sweden’s collaboration with CIA “renditions” (i.e. kidnapping and torture) is no big reason to doubt that Assange would get a fair hearing from Sweden’s judiciary or to fear he would get shipped off to the USA to be charged with political crimes.  

Green noticed that according to this article above “it appears that in 2006 Sweden stopped rendition flights for the USA”

What Green somehow missed in this article he cited was that it also stated

"Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery, two Egyptians who had been seeking asylum in Sweden, were arrested by Swedish police in December 2001. They were taken to Bromma airport in Stockholm, had their clothes cut from their bodies, suppositories inserted in their anuses and in diapers, overall, handcuffs and chains put on an executive jet with American registration N379P with a crew of masked men. "
 

In other words the men were raped and tortured in Sweden which makes the Swedish officials involved in turning them over to US agents accomplices to torture, rape and other grave violations of international and national law that took place in Sweden.
 
I leave it to David Allen Green and his keen legal mind to explain why the men were not raped and tortured.
 
As of 2009 the International Commission of Jurists and the UN Human Rights Council deplored Sweden’s failure to criminally prosecute the Swedish officials or US agents involved.
 

The Human Rights Committee in Alzery v Sweden found that the failure to institute
criminal prosecutions in respect of the conduct of either Swedish or foreign officials
involved in the rendition of Mr Alzery violated Article 7 ICCPR read in conjunction
with Article 2 ICCPR, noting that “as a result of the combined investigations of the
Parliamentary Ombudsman and the prosecutorial authorities, neither Swedish
officials nor foreign agents were the subject of a full criminal investigation, much
less the initiation of formal charges […]”.

 
http://www.icj.org/IMG/UPRSweden.pdf

That’s another huge fact Green missed in his zeal to offer the following apologetic for Sweden’s criminality. Green wrote

Is this case analogous to the Assange extradition? The first answer is that there is a distinction between judicial and extra-judicial activities – and Assange is wanted for a judicial process. Second, rendition is not extradition.  Third, the Agiza and Al-Zery case caused scandal in Sweden leading, among other things, to payments of substantial compensation once the judicial system was engaged.  It was an awful incident but it is not one which carries over easily to the Assange situation.
 

No criminal prosecution for being accomplices to rape and torture, no criminal prosecution of the actual rapists and torturers but Green struggles to see how it “carries over” to the Assange case. Is there a liberal pundit out there ready to stoop lower?
 
A FURTHER NOTE:

According to this document by Amnesty International (a group that is quite easy on Western states and their allies) the rape and torture of the Egyptian men in Stockholm took place in the presence of Swedish officials.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR42/001/2006/en/99c3ecdc-d3d2-11dd-8743-d305bea2b2c7/eur420012006en.html

The relevant passage states
 

"The security team –communicating to one another largely through hand signals – subjected Mohammed El Zari and Ahmed Agiza to a so-called "security check", in the presence of Swedish Security Police personnel and two representatives from the US Embassy in Sweden. In fact, this procedure amounted to an extremely serious physical assault on Mohammed El Zari and Ahmed Agiza.
 
The "security check" consisted of the following:
  1. their clothes were cut off with a pair of scissors, and placed in a plastic bag;
  2. their hair, mouth and ears were thoroughly examined;
  3. they were then handcuffed and shackled;
  4. Mohammed El Zari was then forced to bend over, had a tranquilizer -- apparently some kind of muscle relaxant -- inserted into his anus, and was placed in waterproof underpants. Other reports indicate that both men underwent this;(6)
  5. they were dressed in boiler suits, blindfolded and hooded; and
  6. one of the foreign agents took photographs of it."
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