A4 policestalkingcrimeshr

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

by Reidar Visser

I sometimes wonder why it took me so long to write in the first person about police stalking.

I wanted to exhaust every other possibility first. To make sure that there was no other conceivable road back to the life I once lived. I had been happy as an historian based in Oslo in Norway, working on Iraq and its transition to democracy and the rule of law.

Back in early 2011, when the Oslo police began giving me unwanted attention due to my street photography, I reacted with shock and fear. At the time, my own jurisprudence regarding photography was unrefined and mainly based on induction and analogy: If a Japanese tourist could take mobile camera photos, then so could I. When a fleet of uniformed and unmarked police cars suddenly began chasing me around the streets of Oslo in February 2011 in a so-called police stalking operation (aka “conspicuous

surveillance”), I panicked and got worried I might have overlooked some kind of newly introduced regulation specifically relating to the use of mobile cameras. The harassment, I suspected, could be intended as warm-up before questioning and prosecution.

But when the police persecution continued around the clock for several weeks – escalating to regular sleep disturbance as plainclothes police deliberately woke me up several times every night – I changed my interpretation. I concluded that the more they harassed me, the less they could prosecute me. I was also increasingly convinced that my photography, mostly snapshots taken in broad daylight on the way to and from work and intended for a future sociological project on street fashion, was perfectly legal. Since health issues limit my ability to travel to Iraq, I have always explored various asides as potential alternative research areas for the future.

My next idea was to offer the police some kind of satisfying “result”. In retrospect, this looks stupid and defensive, but back then it seemed to me that I was in a conflict with the police where prosecution was impossible but where they were bent on punishing me extrajudicially anyway. Instead of starting an uphill court struggle or accepting more harassment, I decided I would simply leave the country and continue to do my Iraq work from elsewhere. Norway is not exactly the centre of the universe with respect to Middle East studies. If the Oslo police thought my photography was a problem they could celebrate their little triumph, and that would be the end of the matter.

In late March 2011, I travelled to London with the intention of finding a flat. When Norwegian police came after me and managed to get police in London to replicate the 24/7 harassment protocol they had started in Oslo, I panicked again. The use of resources and manpower seemed insane compared to the trivial nature of my supposed “crime”. Had the Kafkaesque response perhaps been triggered by some kind of translation problem?

Thinking that a huge, federal country would be more difficult to navigate for a Norwegian police team on a profoundly illegal mission, I decided to fly to the United States. In the past, the US government had shown considerable interest in my Iraq research, to the point where they had paid me to fly over from Oslo to DC to give lectures and presentations on political and constitutional issues several times every year since 2005. Why couldn’t I work for them instead? If they paid me a salary instead of all the air tickets, the difference wouldn’t be that big.

The Norwegians came after me to the United States as well. Easily recognisable officers of the organised crime unit within the Oslo police even followed me into research libraries where they deliberately sat next to me and made noise in order to disturb my work on Iraq.

Instead of working into the small hours with Iraq analyses in the way I had used to, I now

had to stay focused just on trying to get some hours of sleep. With a whole team of police officers paid by the Norwegian government for the sole purpose of harassing me 24/7, the odds were stacked against me.

With all the police around, I was reluctant to make the first move towards the US government. I met friends at the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, and considered my options for reaching out to someone high up to explain my predicament.

But even meetings I had at these institutions had evidently been infiltrated by the FBI on the request of the Norwegians. When I got invited to a Middle East event in Qatar in May I decided to go there first instead, hoping that the harassment would stop simply due to the complications of geography and culture. This, in turn, would enable me to safely reach out to people in Washington through a US diplomatic mission. To have Norwegian police in Qatar would be absurd, I thought.

When the same Norwegian police officers came after me to Qatar anyway, I decided to travel to one more Middle Eastern country before contacting a US embassy. I flew to Jordan and on 17 May 2011 offered my services to someone who said he was a CIA station officer at the US embassy in Amman. I basically told him I would be happy to work for the US government anywhere in the world on Iraq or Middle East related subjects as long as they could bring the illegal police harassment to an end. This was not entirely implausible: I am the only academic to have appeared on the prestigious annual Iraq conference of the Office of Iraq Analysis within the CIA five years in a row between 2006 and 2010. The US government has a chronic shortage of people who can read Arabic, and has even fewer who can navigate issues like Iraqi federalism, Shiite internationalism and Iraqi constitutional issues using primary Arabic materials, advanced searches and Deep Web exploration. The areas that I have expertise in are among the core drivers that decide global oil prices and developments in Islamic radicalism; not even a superpower can afford to ignore them.

Nothing came out of my initiative in Jordan. Until this day I am not convinced that the person I met in Amman was really CIA. There were FBI officers travelling with the Norwegians to Qatar, so it is quite possible that they were in Amman too. I can’t claim it was an attempted sting operation (at times they seemed more interested in asking about the reason for my conflict with the Oslo police than about Iraq), but I am pretty sure it wasn’t the real thing.

By the time I came to the Netherlands in June 2011, the idea of going public with the whole affair began to mature. But blogging about my story was not the number one option. First, I thought that by simply staying over a long period in the Netherlands, Norwegian police would find it even more difficult to justify their continued involvement

in the expensive and irrational harassment operation. Surely the Dutch police, in turn, would lose interest and shelve the increasingly scandalous project. Remember that the police stalking went on day and night. The authorities were wasting the money of taxpayers in both Norway and the Netherlands, and even criminalised some of them by luring them into cooperating with the illegal operation against me.

However, the nightmare continued in the Netherlands, with an increasingly heavy health toll for me. I suffer from a chronic inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis) and due to severe constipation during the worst sleep deprivation episodes in Norway in February 2011 I developed gastro-intestinal injuries which Dutch surgeons since have told me have become chronic. In November 2011, I sent an e-mail to several members of the Norwegian cabinet outlining my predicament in considerable detail and made it clear that my only desire was to live undisturbed somewhere and quietly continue my Iraq research.

No response materialised. The Norwegian Labour party has a track record of supporting and promoting untraditional police methods, including police stalking.

In November 2011, I finally tried to enter into dialogue with the Oslo police through a Norwegian lawyer. The police failed to recognise the harassment operation, but did issue a letter to the effect that they had no criminal case against me. That gesture was however of limited value since the police kept instigating people in Norway to send me e-mail messages calculated to cause intimidation. Similarly, in the Netherlands, the stalkers were deliberately parading symbols associated with Norway all the time, including the Norwegian flag. I concluded that if I returned home, the harassment would most likely continue unabated and that it would be better to stay in the Netherlands. My hope was that by focusing on my Iraq research, I could convince the government there I was doing more good than harm.

However, even as I was covering the critical period of transition after the US withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011, the Dutch government kept sabotaging my Iraq research with daily and nightly disturbances. Police stalking is a well known method among Dutch police.

By April 2012, I had a satisfactory overview of the legal aspects of the case: Whereas what I had done in terms of street photography was perfectly legal (my photos were not even close to any of the two main legal red lines, i.e. nudity and/or stalking), almost every step the Norwegian police had taken was illegal and punishable with a maximum of 15 years under article 117a of the Norwegian penal code (psychological torture). I had been able to identify a handful of the most savage ringleaders in the Oslo police and some of the Dutch by full name and rank. Armed with this information, I submitted a formal complaint to the Norway’s independent police commission (Spesialenheten).

My complaint produced no immediate result. Having exhausted most other channels to no avail, by June blogging finally seemed a sensible alternative. But I decided I would do one more attempt to generate what I needed most: Witnesses willing to publicly confirm my unusual story. By that time I could name around 200 people, mostly in Norway and the Netherlands, who had cooperated criminally with the police against me. Some were even academics and people I formerly considered friends. However, only with the support of investigative journalists was it realistic that anyone would come forward and confirm the story.

I thought a third-person version of my case, timed to coincide with the release of the independent commission report on Norway’s 22 July 2011 terror attacks, might generate some media interest in Norway due to the close links between the two cases. Whereas the Oslo police had spent much of their undercover capacity on trailing me across the globe during the critical months before 22 July 2011, they had paid no attention whatsoever to the right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik (despite the existence of tipoffs relating to him). The sharp contrast between the vast resources spent on illegalities against me and the failure to even follow up on Breivik is clearly the stuff of a major scandal. Accordingly, one week before the release of the official Norwegian 22 July report, I published my own version (still in the third person), outlining how the failed priorities of the Oslo police and their waste of taxpayer money had prevented them from tracking down Breivik prior to 22 July.

So far, the response to my blogging about police stalking has been underwhelming compared with what I experienced with writing on Iraq. It is depressingly more difficult to find readers who are interested in human rights abuse in Norway than in Iraq! The most specific result so far is that my employer, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, has intensified its effort to sack me for speaking out against torture by Norwegian police.

Administratively, the institute is within the sphere of the ministry of education/knowledge.

Meanwhile the ministry of justice appears to continue to finance the participation of personnel and resources of the Oslo police in the daily harassment operations which continue where I now am in the Asia-Pacific region.

Shifting to the first person should hopefully help address some credibility issues in my story. To anyone who may have doubt about the veracity of what I am describing, try to see this whole situation from my point of view: I was a successful Iraq analyst who got invited to conferences around the globe. 3,500 people subscribed to my website newsletters. I had a well-paid government job in an oil-rich country with one of the highest standards of living on the planet. What would be the rationality of suddenly complaining about Norwegian police persecution if there was no substance whatsoever to my story?

Why would I put all my credibility and livelihood on the line with serious allegations if it

was all a concoction?

I hope more people will now be able to understand that I cannot possibly write as much on constitutional and rule of law issues in Iraq as I used to. To lecture the Iraqis on democracy when I am being harassed extra-judicially and even tortured by my own so-called democratic government would amount to hypocrisy. Some of my most fundamental human rights under the UN and EU charters have been taken away from me by the Norwegian and Dutch governments. Each and every day for more than one and a half year these so-called democratic governments have paid officials overtime for the single purpose of making noise and wake me up at night. When I experience such conditions at home, how can I criticize conditions in Iraq with a straight face?

The reason that I am now a staunch critic of the police in Norway and the Netherlands is simply that they transformed me into this role. They gave me no other choice. I had signalled my willingness to move and settle down in a banana republic and quietly remain focused on Iraq if they would only stop mistreating me. But they cannot stop. The project is just too enticing in terms of the luxury hotel stays and the air miles earned by the police officers that take part in the “international cooperation effort” against me. Outside the police, no bureaucrat, politician or citizen collaborator has the courage to blow the whistle. The governments of Norway and the Netherlands don’t seem to give a damn about the fact that my Iraq work is still being read on a daily basis by analysts in NATO ally countries like the United States.

That’s why henceforth I shall not be debating the authoritarianism of Iraqi PM Maliki but instead pay attention to Norwegian PM Stoltenberg and his polices. That’s why I shall give up my research on Iraqi political parties and instead do my best to follow in the footsteps of the eminent Norwegian historian Jens Arup Seip, who in a path-breaking lecture in 1963 addressed what he saw as the “Stalinism” of the Norwegian Labour party. And that is the reason why I shall be revealing torture and other illegal methods used by the organised crimes unit of the Oslo police, and how political cover from certain pro-Labour figures in high places in the Norwegian government enables the Oslo police to engage in one of the most totalitarian police operations seen in peacetime Europe. Conversely, the transgressions of the Iraqi secret police and the interior ministry special forces I shall henceforth leave for others to debate. For sure, I will still try to keep track of Iraq with one eye and publish the occasional Iraq article, but the main focus of my research is now Norwegian police criminality. I have no other choice.

I hope readers with a declared interest in human rights will remain interested also when the focus moves to Western democracies. After all, to have a narrow regional focus on a subject like universal human rights can easily become something of a contradiction. In the

end, only those who dare to stand up against human rights abuse at home will have true credibility when they address such issues in distant foreign countries.

For more background, see the about page.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

I am Reidar Visser, an historian with a PhD in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Oxford. I have published three books on the history and politics of Iraq, as well as numerous academic articles on federalism, constitutional change and rule of law issues.

My articles for Foreign Affairs are available here; my op-ed for The New York Times on the end of the Iraq War is here. I have frequently given invited presentations on Iraq-related subjects for organisations like the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon. For my work on deconstructing the dominant narratives on Iraqi politics, I have been called “a one-man truth squad”.

I am also Reidar Visser, a twenty-first century witch, Foucault’s modern madman, the enfant terrible of liberal Western civilisation. Since February 2011, I have been chased and harassed extra-judicially 24/7 by police and state-sponsored vigilantes in altogether 14 countries in Europe, North America, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific. The reason for my predicament is a “crime” which is not a crime: Street photography for a fashion history project. I am a victim of the monstrosity and depravity of pseudo-liberal governments in Norway and the Netherlands, yet I keep dragging my sorry case across the continents in the hope that somewhere there may be a government that actually respects one of the most fundamental of human rights – the presumption of innocence. So far my strange brand of human rights tourism has taken me from Norway to the UK, the USA, Canada, Qatar, Jordan, Switzerland, Italy, France and the Netherlands. I am currently in a country in the Asia-Pacific region where the mistreatment continues and where day and night I am

harassed by plainclothes police officers.

Many would say the discrepancy between these two descriptions of myself are tragic. Some may consider me insane; others might consider my predicament as an obvious rationale for suicide. Suicide certainly seems to be the goal of the police officers that keep harassing me without having any apparent goals defined in convential judicial terms. But I am not going to make it that simple for them. Ever the historian, instead of spending time lamenting my misery, I will try instead to focus on the penetrating insights in the workings of the perverted modern state that I gain from my travails. When their harassment methods get more intrusive, I try to think fieldwork and unique source proximity. Instead of contemplating suicide, I dream of publishing my fourth book. The more they mistreat me, the more I will endeavour to write – both about the criminals that chase me and their cowardly sponsors in high places in the governments of Norway and the Netherlands.

Despite the horror that I am going through, I try to appreciate my newfound knowledge about the scandalous state of our Western, “rational” bureaucracies. I now better understand how Western policy in complex settings like the Middle East can go so horribly wrong. With the academic discoveries I make about our time and the shallowness of our own civilisation, my own pain becomes somewhat meaningful, too. In that kind of perspective, this is not the biggest tragedy of my life; rather, it is the biggest scoop I ever made as an historian. Through writing, I can try to take back what the so-called rechtsstaat of Norway never granted me: Due process, and the right to explain my case.

In this way, my Flying Dutchman journey is not only one of suffering but also one of discovery. Consider it an experiment in social science and contemporary history: My strange case relating to street photography travels across boundaries and cultures, yet it prompts surprisingly stereotypic, savage and intolerant responses across the board, in democratic and non-democratic states alike. This in turn opens up a number of interesting perspectives. It suggests that, when it comes to basic judicial notions like the presumption of innocence, the distinction between advanced, Western liberal democracies and other polities is grossly exaggerated. Similarly, the “rule of law culture” associated with modern Western democracies in my experience comes across as only skin deep. When it comes to judicial culture, post-modernity, it seems, is nothing more than a façade to mask how fragile and reversible the Western transition from traditional society to modernity really is.

Police state tendencies can be found in Norway as they can be found in Qatar; in many cases international police cooperation and the burgeoning NYPDfication of European policing do away with notions of national sovereignty entirely. In brief, my radical thesis is that in several Western countries, the concept of rule of law is nothing more than empty fiction .

I am well aware that in establishing credibility for such a radical perspective, I am facing enormous challenges – especially with regard to communicating to the two very different groups that make up my potential readership.

Firstly, there is the tiny minority of people around the world who know about my affair because they have participated or are still participating in the operation against me. Their numbers are not big: Maybe 150 in Oslo (Norway) where the operation began in 2011; 300 in places I visited for shorter periods during March-June 2011 in the UK, US, Canada, Qatar, Jordan, France and Italy; 700 in Noordwijk in the Netherlands (where I stayed from July 2011 to January 2012); 700 in Maasdam in the Netherlands (where I was from January to July 2012); and finally another 200 where I currently am (a capital city in the Asia-Pacific region). That’s no more than around 2,000. Given that many of these people have cooperated illegally with the police, it seems unlikely they will ever come forward to confirm my story even though they are in a position to do so.

Secondly, there is the vast majority of potential readers who have never heard of what I describe. They will likely think that my narrative is unbelievable, that the charges I bring against celebrated democracies are just too monstrous to be true, and that I may well be suffering from a number of psychiatric illnesses.

To those who think I am now crazy, please consider that every blog post, scientific article and op-ed that I have published since 12 February 2011 (and each of my 3,500 tweets) has been authored under the duress that I am trying to describe. That is a large body of scholarship available for scrutiny and screening for possible traces of madness. To those familiar with my Iraq scholarship, I solemnly swear every word I write about police stalking is just as close to the truth as anything I have ever written on Iraq.

Please remember also that this is not the first time I have been considered an academic lunatic. Remember Iraq’s dark days of 2006, when I stoically maintained that the country would survive in one piece, and when just about every pundit in DC dismissed me as a nationalist dogmatic for not embracing “soft partition”? Well, look where we are today.

Iraq still stands; the interpretation of the lunatic prevailed. Why not instead take into account the possibility that I may be a rare case of an articulate subaltern, speaking a language that academics understand, and describing, as a subject, police mistreatment that is usually meted out to people who may be less likely to write about it: The homeless, prostitutes, drug addicts and other marginalised enemies of the state. With the ferocity and the bluntness of the operation carried out against me – who was always a potential whistle-blower – how much more can there be hidden beneath the tip of the iceberg? When the police in a country with a pristine democracy reputation like Norway can work like this, how do you think conditions are in states with far worse human rights rankings?

Away from this blog, I am pursuing several long-term goals. These include activism on the part of other victims of police criminality and police stalking; the completion, using alternate sources, of my street fashion history project that was criminalized by Norwegian police and led them to target me in the first place; and writing a blow by blow account of my experiences with police stalking.

Above all, after more than 550 days of around the clock extra-judicial punishment, I hope to lift the debate about my case from the question of the virtues or otherwise of my photographic activity, to the bigger issue of why I, as a controversial photographer, am not entitled to exactly the same legal protection as the terrorist, the rapist and the paedophile. It is a source of some considerable irony to me that I was applauded back in 2010 for my work demanding due process and the presumption of innocence for members of the Saddam regime in Iraq. They may well have included rapists and murderers, but I always defended their right to a fair trial when it was in jeopardy due to vigilantism sponsored by political parties inside the Iraqi government. When I today trumpet the same due-process rights to for controversial photographers in Norway, people react with fear and suspect I may be mad.

Through my writings I hope to show that the principles of presumption of innocence, no punishment without law and the right to appear before a court must apply as much in Norway as they do in Iraq, regardless of whether the alleged crime relates to murder or photography. In the second when claims to respect human rights lose their universality, they become a joke.

Feel free to write to me: reidarvisser (at) gmail.com On Twitter: http://twitter.com/reidarvisser

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

Since this case concerns the rights of citizens to take photographs with a mobile camera, here is an excerpt from a longer article detailing the relevant jurisprudence on mobile photography in Norway and other Western countries. For the full article, see this link.

The legal framework governing photography in public areas is pretty much the same in Norway as in the rest of the Western world – photography is considered permitted in publicly accessible areas unless expressly forbidden. The Norwegian penal code has only one specific mention of photography and that relates to the commercial exploitation of child pornography. Each major city also has separate police regulations, but again the relevant ones for Oslo – which cover every conceivable problem under the sun ranging from skateboarding to loud song performances – has no mention of photography. When photography is forbidden in Norway, there will typically be a sign saying so, most often in

the vicinity of security installations or military areas. A proposal to make certain types of privacy-invading photography illegal (such as taking photographs by peeping inside a private home) was shelved by Norwegian parliamentarians in the 1970s.

Reflecting this state of affairs, the Norwegian code on police methods, which goes into considerable details regarding things like video recordings from hidden devices, does not say anything about photography at all, again indicating that the police can take photographs as much as they want simply because everybody can. This interpretation was specifically confirmed by a group of Norwegian legal experts who wrote a critical treatise on police methods in light of European standards on privacy in 2004 (NOU 6/2004). Senior officials of the Norwegian police mostly accept these principles even in cases that more conservative observers would consider as privacy infractions, as seen for example in comments by police lawyer Tor Henning Knudsen in 2003 relating to so-called “candid” streetshots from Oslo (the lawfulness of the photography itself was not disputed and the act of publication considered lawful because no identifiable faces were shown, Dagbladet, 11 June 2003), and again by Trondheim police in relation to a case involving someone photographing naked children using special equipment in July 2010 (specficially describing the act of photography as lawful but indicating concerns regarding publication, Adresseavisen, 31 July 2010). There is even a ruling from Oslo district court as recently as early 2009 which specifically confirmed the right of citizens to make photographs with their mobile phones in public areas (the police had tried to fine a lawyer who photographed them, TV2, 6 February 2009).

In line with this relatively liberal approach, conviction of photographers by Norwegian courts are few and far between, mostly limited to very obvious infractions of privacy in the most intimate ways imaginable. A ruling from Bergen from 2006 on indecent behaviour involved a large number of so-called “up-skirt” photographs as well as a photo of a semi-naked teenage girl in a dressing room (summary of the case in BA, 30 November 2011). Another ruling from Hamar in 2009 involved beach photographies including topless images that were subsequently uploaded to an explicitly pornographic website.

Finally, in an extraordinary case from Sunndal involving a gynecologist surreptitiously photographing a large number of women during consultations, a fine of 25,000 kroner (USD 4,000) was imposed in 2010. The case seemed to involve grotesque privacy violations in a number of ways: The extreme asymmetry of power, speaking both physically (the fully clad doctor versus the naked women in stirrups) and psychologically (the unchallengeable authority that many associate with a doctor versus the difficult position of the women who may have been worried and were seeking advice for a health problem that made them uneasy in the first place); the exceptional invasion of privacy (the photographs covered mainly the genitalia of the women); the absence of anonymity (the doctor named files according to the personal names of the patients); a very high number of this kind of intimate photographs (2,000 plus). The slight reaction by the judiciary in terms

of a heavy fine seems to verge on the over-permissive. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that it came after the national prosecutor had intervened (the case was first dismissed by the district prosecutor who considered the images non-pornographic). In other words, if the Norwegian judiciary had wanted to send a strong signal about mobile photography in the period it was involved with that case (2007-2011), it had a golden opportunity to do so – but eventually refrained from imposing a heavier punishment.

The Norwegian situation reflects European conditions and interpretations more broadly. In Denmark, photography is expressly prohibited only with reference to military sites and if attempts are made to take photographs of people who are beyond areas of public access (penal code 264a). In 2006, the Swedish supreme court went as far as dismissing an attempted case against a person who had secretly videotaped naked adults in private gardens (including in intimate situations), arguing that these persons could not have been the victim of an offense as long as they did not know about the filming and only found out afterwards (Sydsvenskan, 15 November 2006). Clearly this decision may come across as overly liberal in light of the private-home red line indicated by the European court of human rights, but it does show just how liberal European judiciaries can be when it comes to photography. Swedish police reiterated this line in 2009 when they declared lawful the photography of thousands of Swedes on the beach (including naked ones) by way of concealed equipment and subsequent uploads of the images to a semi-pornographic website (Expressen, Helsingborg Dagblad, 19 july 2009).

In the Netherlands, one can sometimes find signs indicating explicit prohibition of photography, for example in public toilets. Only cases involving massive privacy violations, such as filming seriously ill people inside a hospital and then publishing the material on TV without their consent, have led to court cases. The European human rights court generally confirmed these interpretations in a ruling related to Austria (Friedl vs Austria), where photography by police of demonstrations was acknowledged as rightful and where it was maintained that privacy rights in the European convention on human rights primarily concerned the right of the individual to “fully be himself or herself” in private areas like a home (in Swedish, cases involving privacy violations are literally called “violation of freedom of the home” or hemfridsbrott.) The UK and the United States go even further in seeing the right to photograph almost anything in public as part of freedom of expression. The London Metropolitan Police explicitly says it cannot stop any photographic activity (the discussion includes mobile phones) except if it relates to an act of terrorism.

In the United States, restrictions on photography mainly relate to grey-zone areas that are technically speaking public, but where a degree of privacy is expected – above all restrooms and locker rooms, with an emphasis on outlawing photography of the private

parts of the body. Similar legislation has been passed in Australia and New Zealand (also referred to as anti-voyeurism legislation). New Zealand stands out as a country whose politicians have deliberated these issues at length before arriving at the conclusion that nudity constitutes the red line that can be meaningfully enforced. In a unique case, New Zealand in 2005 prosecuted a person for non-nude photography, in a case involving a large number of high school girls photographed on their way to school (The Queen vs Rowe, 2005). The verdict of indecent behaviour, which went all the way to the supreme court, emphasised the elaborately concealed method for making the photographies (the photographer was hidden behind curtains in a caravan) as well as the absence of a legitimate purpose. However, legal experts in New Zealand today consider this case as an outlier, not least since the same person was acquitted in a second, separate case by the high court later in 2005 for photographing a number of young women in a public library, which was seen as “strange but not indecent” (New Zealand Herald, 17 December 2005).

This kind of photographic liberalism has in many countries been corroborated by the photographic activities of the state itself. Consider TV programmes of the Candid Camera kind. Norway had a state-sponsored incarnation called Smil til det skjulte kamera, in which thousands of Norwegians were filmed (and often broadcast), sometimes in unpleasant situations orchestrated by the production teams.

In short, in Norway as well as in Europe and the Western world more broadly, photography is accepted in ways it is not in many Islamic countries, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Sudan.

In Qatar, tourist information leaflets specifically say visitors must ask permission before photographing anyone, especially women. In Sudan you need a government permit for taking any photos. Norway is not Sudan.

The one area of European (and Western) human rights jurisprudence that could conceivably be of relevance in this case relates to stalking. However, the existing laws on stalking in several countries invariably confirm that a single act of photography of a particular stranger is not stalking. Almost every law on stalking requires regularity and duration in harassment that targets a specific individual, and certainly that whatever unwanted attention is involved takes place more than once (examples include Italy, Belgium and England & Wales). In general, the modern judicial interpretation of stalking does not emphasise the original, medieval meaning of the term (“to move stealthily”).

Whereas this concept can be form in colloquial expressions relating to photography across Europe (snikfotografering in Norwegian or smygfotografering in Swedish); it is simply not reflected by any legal category apart from those relating to either repeated harassment or privacy invasion in the sense of the private home or the naked body.

In fact, it seems that sometimes, Norwegian police are actually prepared to accept a lot

more than other countries in terms of people watching and photographing each other. In a remarkable case, it was revealed in 2011 that a Norwegian security company had not only photographed visitors and people who came to the US embassy in Oslo (the monitoring was done on behalf of the Americans), but also kept files in which people were identified and their political affiliations analysed. Despite this project going much further than the fashion history project of the stalking victim, Oslo police officially concluded that the eager embassy watchers were simply engaged in “observation” (rather than “surveillance”) and as such could do what they did because everybody can. No police action against the group was seen as mandated (Aftenposten 10 December 2010; NRK 19 January 2011).

A question that keeps coming up when I talk to people about my case relates to children.

Two points on this. First, my portfolio of street photographs may have contained an extremely small number of people who were technically legal minors. Since I clearly wasn’t producing porn (which is the only setting where age would legally come into play), I didn’t enquire about anyone’s age. Moreover, the selection of motives mostly covered people in the range 16-35, which is the most important segment in terms of defining street fashion. Methodologically, it was a point to show the width of a population which subscribed to a particular “look”; however the percentage that may have been included to show extreme ends of the spectrum was tiny, certainly involving fewer legal minors than what the average tourist comes home with from a trip to a distant country. Most of the combinations of clothes involved expensive garments that are typically only bought when people reach an age where they no longer grow.

And as said before, in any case, this is again legally irrelevant. It is not illegal to take pictures of children. If there was a pattern of persistent photography where pedophilia was suspected, this would normally prompt so much unpleasant questioning by parents and teachers that it would probably be self-regulating. If the police feels that unassisted vigilantism of this kind is insufficient, specific legislative action would be needed before the police would have any legitimate role. Again there are signs Norwegian police don’t understand this, and are simply making up laws according to their own mind. For example, in a recent case from the Stavanger area, a man was asked to delete photographs taken of children “with whom he did not have a relationship”. Once more the cops are para-legislating; another red line taken out of the air without consulting the national assembly, which is the competent authority if the police think current laws on the book are inadequate. Let me nonetheless put on the record that I have never in my life had a single photograph of a naked child or children in a remotely sexual situation on my computer, or possessed such photographs in any shape or form.

It should be added that in my case, the police’s own actions by and large testify to the absence of an actus reus. I f there was real victim or a disturbance of the public order, the

police would have had the duty to intervene as quickly possible to prevent the multiplication of victims or the persistence of disorder in the public sphere. And this they didn’t do even though I have reason to believe they have kept me under watch for pretty much the whole period when I was engaged in street photography. If they truly believed I was a pedophile, they would never let large numbers of unaccompanied children take part in the harassment of me in the Netherlands either.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

This is an overview of places I visited during my flight from Norwegian police harassment since February 2011. Some of the people in these places have cooperated with the police; however I consider them, too, to be victims of police officers who unlawfully lured them into taking part in the stalking operation.

When

Where

Means of travel

February 2011

Oslo

21 Mar

Oslo - Bergen

SK273

Suitellet, Kokstad

22 Mar

Bergen Amsterdam

KL1188

(transit)

22 Mar

Amsterdam London

BA439

Renaissance Chancery Court

British Library

25 Mar

London Newark

CO111

Nassau Inn, Princeton NJ

Princeton University Library (Firestone building)

29 Mar

Princeton, NJ Washington DC

Amtrak

Ritz Carlton, Pentagon City

Library of Congress, Newspaper Reading Room

2 Apr

Washington DC - Boston

Amtrak

Boston Harbor Hotel

Harvard University Library (Widener)

Lodging

Places visited, events attended

Private apartment, Lille Bislett 24

NUPI, Radisson Blu Scandinavia, Coop Mega Dalsbergstien, ICA Theresesgate, Rema 1000 Pilestredet, Coop Prix Pilestredet Park, Rimi VG-passasjen, Kiwi Hegdehaugsveien, Kiwi St. Olavs gate

7 Apr

Boston Montreal

AC7685

Intercontinental Montreal

13 Apr

Montreal Ottawa

VIA Rail

Marriott Kent Street

17 Apr

Ottawa Washington DC

AC7658

Marriott Wardman Park

19 April CIA/OIA event Ballston; 20 April State Department; 22 April National Press Club; 25 April USIP event

26 Apr

Washington DC - Seattle

UA917

Marriott Waterfront, Seattle

Seattle Public Library

3 May

Seattle Washington DC

UA260

Marriott Fairview

Library of Congress

7 May

Washington DC - Doha

QR52

Moevenpick Doha

Doha Forum / Enriching the Middle East’s Economic Future, Sheraton Hotel

15 May

Doha - Amman

QR

Marriott Amman

17 May US Embassy Amman

4 Jun

Paris Amsterdam

KL1234

Sheraton Schiphol

Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam

17 Jun

Amsterdam Paris

AF1741

Sheraton Charles Gaulle Airport

Was booked to travel to Beirut for Carnegie Institute event, cancelled for health reasons

20 Jun

Paris Amsterdam

KL1234

Moevenpick Amsterdam

Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam

30 Jun

Amsterdam Scheveningen

Steigenberger Kurhaus Hotel

9 Jul

Kijkduin

NH Kijkduin

14 Jul

Leiden

Golden Tulip Leiden

18 Jul 2011

Noordwijk

Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin

Stay OK Noordwijk, Het Zuiderbad, MacDonalds, Hoofdstraat, Degger Kappers, Fletcher Hotel de Witte Raaf, Fletcher Hotel Duinoord, Strandrestaurant Nedersandt, Het Centrum Katwijk, Strandpaviljoen De Gouden Bal

29 Jan 2012

Maasdam (Zuid Holland)

Private apartment, Resenburgh

Ton Slager, Hoeksche Apotheek, Dio Drogisterij Puttershoek, De Drie Lelies Puttershoek

15 Jul

Amsterdam Taipei

Novotel, Taipei Airport

I have since departed Taiwan and am now staying elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region.

McGill University Library McLennan-Redpath Library Complex, Complexe Desjardins

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

In an attempt to shelter my parents as much as possible I have released information relating to my case of police mistreatment in a gradual fashion, writing a large body of the material in the third person. My hope was that at some point witnesses might come forward and enable me to seek prosecution of the police officers that are mistreating me, but nothing of the sort materialised. This left me with no other choice than telling the full story. Now that everything has finally been published in bits and pieces, a coherent summary may perhaps be useful.

The immediate reason I was targeted by Norwegian police in February 2011 was my street photography in Oslo for an academic project on fashion history. Such photography is perfectly legal, but the police disliked it. Instead of telling me about their concerns, though, they initiated a police-stalking operation against me. The methods were

conspicuous surveillance at day (unmarked police cars driving in circles around me wherever I went) and extensive sleep deprivation (unmarked police cars constantly revving their engines outside my apartment continuously through every night).

Fearing for my personal health and viewing the sleep deprivation operation by the Norwegian police as antithetical to basic human rights like the presumption of innocence, the principle of legality and habeas corpus, I quit the country in March 2011. However, Norwegian police pursued me to 9 other countries over the next three months, replicating the same illegal harassment protocol in the UK, the US, Canada, Qatar, Jordan, Italy, France and the Netherlands.

I arrived in the Netherlands in June 2011 and decided to stay since I have Dutch citizenship and should enjoy maximum civil rights protection there. However, the mistreatment persisted and even escalated in two significant ways. Firstly, my sexual minority orientation (sadomasochist) was used extensively by the police to recruit the local population in Noordwijk and Maasdam, both in Zuid Holland province, to harass me. The police’s flawed jurisprudence involves a general attempt at casting a sexual slur on my street photography, sometimes with further strictures on my sexuality involving allegations of fetishism towards objects in the pictures I took. Secondly, from June 2012, Dutch police began using unconventional electronic devices (probably a variant of directed energy weapons) to torture me at home, especially at night. The combination of these elements means the operation has reached a point where it can be adequately described as a crime against humanity.

I left the Netherlands in July 2012 hoping that other countries would at least reject the illegal electronic torture devices that Dutch police had used. However, when I travelled to Asia the Dutch were joined by Norwegian and other European police officers who continued to mistreat and torture me on a daily basis, including during my eight-month stay in New Zealand. I returned to Europe in April 2013 and am still being mistreated. In a particularly worrisome development, towards the end of my stay in New Zealand, the use of directed energy weapons was increased to life-threatening levels, and this has only got worse after I came back to Europe.

The Labour-led government of Norway has been informed about the case since 25 October 2011, but has failed to act. Indeed, it has continued to finance the illegalities of the police, including the despatch of Norwegian police officers overseas who have tortured me in Asia even after they themselves issued an official letter to the effect that they have no criminal case against me. Norway’s independent police commission dismissed my case after skimming through a note I wrote to them and did not even bother to check the license plates of the cars that harassed me for a full month in Oslo in 2011, or the alibis of a

dozen of specific, individual Norwegian police officers who have harassed me in various parts of the world during the course of 2011.

Beyond the mass violation of my most basic human rights under the EU and UN charters, the case highlights the massive failure of the national security policy of the Labour-led Norwegian government. Through their support of illegal police methods they enabled the emergence of the organised crime unit of the Oslo police as a renegade terrorist gang that roams the streets of Oslo with impunity and destroys the lives of hundreds of individuals without ever resorting to due process in their misguided law enforcement efforts – the only things they are in fact enforcing are their own, sick judicial fantasies. It was this culture that enabled the intelligence failure that led to the 22 July terror attacks in Norway.

It was the same culture that led to the strange situation where the Oslo police harass sexual minorities, bikers and prostitutes with impunity whereas the secret police – which unlike the ordinary police was subject to a devastating independent commission investigation in the 1990s – hardly dare to keep tabs on potential terror suspects, including known al-Qaida affiliates, due to privacy concerns.

Some readers who are familiar with my writing on the politics of Iraq have suggested that the case against me is of a political nature. I personally believe it has to do with bureaucratic stupidity and the insatiable appetite for “international cooperation” among police officers who just can’t seem to get enough good excuses for getting away from boring policing on the beat. Whatever the reason, the outcome is that I will be writing about rule of law breaches in Norway and other Western countries, rather than in Iraq, as long as my ordeal continues.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

July 15, 2012

Most people will at some point in their lives have experienced bullying. Local neighbourhoods, schools and workplaces are common settings where bullies operate.

Bullying is destructive – it can lead to social isolation, dependence on drugs or even suicide. Thankfully, though, in most cases there are limiting factors. For example, bullies are rarely able to penetrate the confines of a private home. Alternatively, in extreme cases, there is the possibility of physical relocation – to a different area, or even to another country.

Now, imagine if that bothersome gang of bullies on the corner near school was a powerful state. Consider that it may have the resources and mandate to install surveillance devices in

your private home, track your every movement, and follow you geographically everywhere, even to other countries. Sounds like a wild experiment in totalitarianism on the lines of George Orwell’s 1984? Alas, this kind of government-sponsored bullying already exists in numerous Western democracies today. It operates in various guises and under different names, but these can all be subsumed under the general heading police stalking. Even though the bully in this case is a state, the underlying logic and the modus operandi is remarkably similar to that of a gang of teenage bullies – except that the resources and the potential to do damage to the lives of individuals are vastly bigger.

Human rights aspects Stalking is a method used by the police when they are angry with a person but are unable or unwilling to express their anger in proper judicial terms. Typically, the targets are marginal groups or individuals engaged in activities that are not perfectly mainstream (and therefore disliked by some) but without being punishable by law. Biker gangs, marginal political groups, human rights activists as well as dissident academics are known to have been targets of these kinds of operations in various Western countries. Very often police stalking involves monstrous abuse of power by police in cases where they are simply unable to understand and fit the subject into their normal criminal procedure scheme.

Since prosecution is impossible, the goal is often to force individuals to leave a particular geographical area, though stalking operations can continue nationwide or even internationally. Police stalking is known to exist in North America as well as in a number of European states, including in Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom. There is however no uniform nomenclature. Terms that are sometimes used to describe police stalking (but that sometimes may describe something else) include “conspicuous surveillance” in English, “step by step pursuit” or fotfølging in Norwegian, “to man mark someone” or mandsopdækning in Danish (originally a soccer/ball game term) and ”targeted disturbance of an individual” or persoonsgericht verstoren in Dutch.

Police stalking is one of the most cowardly forms of policing that exist. It violates the most basic principles of the human rights revolution against state abuse that began in Europe in the eighteenth century, including the inviolable principle that a citizen has the right to appear before an independent court with due process and a fair hearing if the police think he or she has done something wrong. One of the most sacrosanct ideas in modern Western judicial philosophy is the requirement that police adhere to due process principles if they want to target someone, or else leave citizens undisturbed. These principles are formally enshrined in the UN declaration on human rights (freedom from inhumane and degrading treatment in article 5; equality before the law in article 7; the right to appear before a court (habeas corpus) in articles 6 and 10; the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty (praesumptio innocentia) in article 11a; freedom from

punishment in the absence of a legally defined infraction (nulle poena sine lege) in article 11b; the right to privacy in a private home in article 12). They are similarly guaranteed by the European convention on human rights (article 3 on inhuman/degrading treatment; article 6 on the right to a trial and the presumption of innocence; article 7 on no punishment without law; article 8 on the inviolability of the private home). Together, these articles impose certain minimum standards all state powers must adhere to if they wish to prosecute a citizen and deprive that person of his or her liberty. When these standards are violated, the unique legitimacy of the police as law enforcer is in jeopardy.

Police stalking takes the opposite approach of modern Western judicial tradition. Police stalking involves attempts to informally and without resort to any court of law label otherness and marginality as crimes. Often there may be no formal contact with the police at all, since these cases rarely involve infractions of the law of the land. Instead, the police will often circumvent the whole idea of prosecution before a court altogether and put to one side any relevant penal codes. As an alternative to normal prosecution, they will then organise a protocol of their own for putting pressure on the stalking victim. With no reference to existing laws and regulations, the police will devise a programme of bullying to be carried out by a mix of uniformed and plainclothes police, sometimes also with a degree of community involvement as part of a “community policing� approach.

Even though the recruitment of wider sections of the population in stalking operations means an even worse infraction of the presumption of innocence, this option is tempting for the police since social marginalisation may often be an effective driver towards expelling an individual from a geographical area. This is also a disturbing aspect: Any number of angry police officers cannot create a police state on their own, but when the general population and the intelligentsia acquiesces or even takes part, Orwellian parallels become very relevant. Police stalking is a process where the police are jury, judge and executioner – the principal characteristic of a police state.

How police stalking works The exact techniques used in police stalking may differ from country to country, but some basics recur. Establishing control of the physical movements of the targeted individual is seen as key, and this goal in turn requires hyper-invasive surveillance methods. In addition to traditional surveillance technologies like wiretaps, computer surveillance and hidden video surveillance, the police will frequently place a tracking device on the clothes of the stalking victim. Having achieved that, the police will aim to disturb the stalking victim as much as possible throughout the day and night. Again, the exact methods may vary according to the circumstances of the individual operation. A fleet of marked and unmarked police cars trailing the stalking victim everywhere appears to be a mainstay

feature in most countries (this is likely also the origin of the term “conspicuous surveillance”). Using a tracking device enables the police to forecast the movements of the stalking victim so that the people who chase him or her can be given instructions to “meet” rather than pursue the stalking victim on the street. This is a distinctive feature of modern, cell phone assisted police stalking that differentiates it from traditional stalking and undercover pursuit or “tailing”. The reason is simply that whereas in traditional undercover work the goal of the police was not to be seen, their aim is the opposite in stalking operations!

A main element in police stalking operations is noise. Typically, the police will try to make noise wherever the stalking victim is, for example by letting unmarked cars run their engines endlessly outside the house of the stalking victim, using their horns excessively etc. When the police have good surveillance, a beep of the horn from an unmarked police car each time the stalking victim enters or exits a building is at the same time subtle vis-a-vis the community at large and intimidating and paranoia-inducing for the stalking victim.

Light is another common ingredient. Participants in police stalking operations will typically use a lot more light than normal: Cars driving with main beams on in broad daylight, cyclists using lights on their bikes in perfect sunshine, or even cars parked in parking lots with their lights constantly blinking are recurrent features of these operations.

Again, in isolation, totally unremarkable and innocuous; when encountered every 2 minutes each day the stalking victim is out walking, an obvious trigger for paranoia.

Humiliation can be yet another prominent aspect of police stalking operations – an element that shows how police stalking is often as medieval in content as it is twenty-first century in technology. This is also the aspect of these operations that is most frequently met with disbelief when stalking victims report them. A number of stories from different countries are however sufficiently uniform to be convincing. Sometimes plainclothes police use symbolism intended to show that the stalking victim is marginal and unwanted.

For example, they may stage “street theatre” with people simulating blind or handicapped people constantly congregating around the stalking victim. Street theatre may also relate to the perceived offense that created the conflict with the police; this is typically done through plainclothes police mimicking the “unwanted” actions of the stalking victim that led to him or her being targeted by police in the first place.

Finally, sleep deprivation is in some countries another important element in police stalking. When it is used, police will employ every conceivable technique to wake up the stalking victims at regular intervals during the night. Obviously, the exact methods depend on where the stalking victim lives, but common methods include the use of cars outside

the home of the stalking victim as well as slamming with doors and banging on adjacent walls. Almost all police stalking methods constitute human rights violations, but the invasion of a private home is perhaps the feature of these operations that is most glaringly at variance with modern European interpretations of the right to privacy – which tend to define the home as an inviolable precinct where each individual may have the right to be “fully himself or herself”, away from the public sphere and shutting the world out entirely (Niemitz versus Germany, 1988). Forced sleep deprivation is described as “inhumane” by a majority of judges and as “torture” by a minority at the European court of human rights.

Police stalking and community policing The involvement of society at large in police stalking operations may also differ according to context. In some countries, the privacy violation involved in sharing information about fellow citizens is taken seriously by the police; as a consequence the stalking is mainly carried out by a mix of uniformed and plainclothes police. In other countries, limited segments of the local community may be involved – for example through the employment of other emergency services in the stalking patrols (fire engines and ambulances), cooperation with shopping mall security guards (these may be asked to behave in an intimidating way towards the stalking victim) or even services providers more broadly (supermarkets, restaurants, and, where applicable, hotels.) An advantage for the police is that people in low-income jobs will often feel gratified when asked to help the police with something and without thinking about the judicial and human-rights aspect will gladly make some extra noise in their office or restaurant “for the good cause” until the stalking victim feels so intimidated that he or she moves somewhere else. The near universal knee-jerk preparedness among large parts of the general population in many countries to do anything the police asks without considering the legal aspects of these actions (i.e being accessory to an act of stalking) is a sad but very prominent feature of many so-called liberal societies today.

In police stalking involving the society at large, each act of intimidation may be much less hurtful than what is commonly seen in a bullying situation. The whole point is to induce paranoia by repeating seemingly commonplace incidents endlessly, in what becomes a familiar pattern, at least to the stalking victim. For example, in addition to making deliberate noise, people at shops may be instructed to greet the stalking victim in particular ways, for example by compulsively using something like a “have a nice day” greeting (which is very common but surely not universal in most languages). There may be bogus emergency calls to places visited by the stalking victim with fire engines or ambulances showing up where the stalking victim is for no good reason. An alarm goes off each time the stalking victim enters a shopping centre (this is caused by interaction between the tracking device hidden on the stalking victim’s belongings and the electronic theft

protection system of the shop); a clearly arranged succession of cars with blinking lights will line the streets wherever he or she goes. These are plausible incidents, just mildly out of the ordinary. Except that in a police stalking setting, on every corner there is a little oddity greeting the stalking victim. In this way, despite the seemingly innocuous and everyday character of each individual act of intimidation, the cumulative effect is bigger than in traditional bullying given the far greater scale of involvement.

The most depraved variants of police stalking involve large sections of a local community, who may take part in the stalking patrols, assist the police in disturbing the stalking victim with noise in their local neighbourhood (such as driving aggressively around the victim) or receive instructions to address the stalking victim in particular ways. At least one EU member country is known to practise this most totalitarian variant of police stalking, which conceptually seems somewhat related to social isolation methods reported from communist East Germany. Another disturbing aspect of many police stalking operations are the crude attempts by the police to signal stigmatisation and marginalisation by deliberately parading disproportionate numbers of physically and mentally handicapped people in “street theatre” designed to humiliate the stalking victim. It makes sense to discuss these particular variants of widespread community-based police stalking as possible crimes against humanity – not for what they do towards the stalking victim, but for the deliberate and disproportionate employment by the police of children and other legal minors as well as the handicapped. Not only are stigmas relating to physical handicaps reproduced. Children are socialised into believing bullying of socially marginal targets is acceptable and that the police has the right to administer extrajudicial punishment in the most totalitarian fashion imaginable.

Often these different elements are combined so that the general public may “cooperate with the police” in what they see as comparatively soft bullying during daytime (joining the police in chasing the stalking victim with their cars, for example) whereas the more physical mistreatment – chiefly sleep deprivation – is carried out by the police themselves at night in more secretive precision hits directed at the private home of the stalking victim.

Normally, it is probably these nocturnal disturbances done by police away from the gaze of the public that are instrumental in putting the stalking victim under unbearable pressure and force him or her to move, but the police are happy to keep these dirtiest activities in the dark and let the general public believe it is their noble “cooperation with the police” in their shops and restaurants that pushes the stalking victim around. The use of sleep deprivation by the police in stalking operations is generally consonant with the “leaveno-marks” characteristic of torture in democratic states identified by Darius Rejali.

Legal aspects of police stalking

On top of the obvious human rights violations involved, almost all forms of police stalking are specifically illegal (and hence punishable by law) in the countries where they are carried out. This is so, firstly because the police laws in most democratic countries do not give the police powers to conduct gross privacy invasions unless a very serious crime is suspected. In many states, even systematic surveillance (as opposed to occasional observation) requires suspicion about a specific crime that is punishable by law. Secondly, many democratic countries have laws that specifically make stalking illegal, or there are laws relating to psychological torture in place. In fact, despite the care taken by police to simulate “normal behaviour” (cars just driving in the streets and making a little noise, people slamming doors, noisy construction work etc.), these acts are prosecutable under most anti-stalking laws in the second they are staged in relation to a particular stalking victim – and with the police officer in charge as the main stalking offender. This is so because police stalking operations are quintessentially based on regular harassment of a particular individual, which is the key to defining stalking as a criminal offense in most countries that have relevant legislation, including Austria (107a), Belgium (442), Germany (241b), Italy and the Netherlands (285b). The anti-harassment law of England and Wales from 1997 similarly emphasises repeated unwanted behaviour towards someone else (twice or more). A good example is the Italian anti-stalking law, which addresses “continued harassing, threatening or persecuting behaviour which 1.) causes a state if anxiety and fear in the victim; or, 2.) fills the victim with fear for his/her own safety or for the safety of relatives…; or 3). forces the victim to change daily habits.”

It is immaterial in this respect whether each act of intimidation in police stalking may be legal in isolation. It is the repeated targeting of an individual with the intention to harass – regardless of method – that is key. For example, driving a car in broad daylight with full head beam lights – a common practice for cars participating in police stalking – may not be illegal if a person does it by mistake. Conversely, once a police officer tells a citizen to turn on high beam lights in order to intimidate or terrify a fellow citizen, that police officer will in most countries be liable to prosecution for a stalking crime. If a citizen goes along with the order but without knowing the reason or intent, it may be a case of unknowing collaboration in organised stalking, and as such may not be punishable by law for that citizen. However, once he or she knows there is a deliberate intention to stalk, turning on the head lights of a car will become punishable in most countries also for the collaborator who responds to a request from the police to participate in something he or she knows (or should have known) is illegal.

In this respect, one could argue that many European penal codes in theory offer somewhat enhanced protection towards police stalking. This is so because the anti-stalking laws of many states in the US also require the presence of specific and explicit threats (often absent in police stalking) as part of the definition of stalking. On the other hand, Denmark appears to offer little protection since its anti-stalking law is hinged on the existence of an

individual anti-stalking order by the police! Generally speaking, the minimum demand in stalking legislation worldwide is regularity of harassment, and then with some various added preconditions in countries with more liberal laws (explicit threats in the U.S., a specific warning by the victim that the stalking must stop in Belgium etc.)

In this way, police stalking contradicts almost every basic aspect of modern judicial philosophy. The judicial principles involved are no more sophisticated than those of the gang bully context. In police stalking there is neither burden of proof nor any roadmap for societal reintegration. The punishments are concocted by the police themselves or society at large depending on context. In the worst cases, the night-time harassment may be carried out by uneducated thugs that know no more about human rights and have no greater respect for human life than an average Syrian shabiha torturer. These are state-authorised bullies with the mind sets of 6-year olds who get overtime payment from supposedly liberal states for making noises with cars and slamming doors at night. Also, unlike the situation in countries that openly practise torture and corporal punishment, in Western police stalking there is no medical supervision whatsoever. It is a well known fact that psychological stress plays a key role in a number of physical illnesses and negatively affects many chronic conditions like asthma, inflammatory bowel syndrome and irritable colon. In police stalking operations, the supposedly democratic Western state is basically running around like a mad dog – barking and wheezing, entirely without being able to offer any judicial justification for its anger.

Suggestions for how to limit police stalking Are there nonetheless contexts in which police stalking can be considered defensible as a contribution to upholding the rule of law? In a geographically limited, very local setting – maybe. There may be a perception in a local community that there is some kind of unusual behaviour that is seen as a nuisance but that nonetheless does not lend itself easily to criminal prosecution. Faced with requests from the general public to “do something”, the police may feel powerless and frustrated. In this kind of context, it is understandable if the police turn to limited variants of stalking in public areas as a preventative strategy. At the same time, though, there should be limits to the application of this kind of strategy with reference to the imperatives of international and human rights principles. In the first place, police stalking should be strictly limited to the public sphere. Police stalking should never target anyone inside their private home or when they are in uninhabited areas. Where there are no potential victims there is also no possible preventative justification! The very minimum criterion for the application of conspicuous surveillance strategy must be that there actually exists someone that needs protection from the perceived problem – a potential “victim”. Said with different words, in a democracy and a rechtsstaat, in the absence of clearly defined preventative or investigative goals, the caravan of a gang

member should be as inviolable as the residence of the prime minister. Sleep deprivation per definition has no preventative value since the chances of undesirable behaviour inevitably is greater when the stalking victim is awake than when he or she is sleeping.

Actually, the widespread police maxim of being “the boss on the street” might actually offer a good rule of the thumb as regards police stalking. The corollary to that ideal, of course, is that it is not the business of the police to invade private homes or follow people into uninhabited areas unless there is suspicion about a specific, legally defined crime.

Precisely because conspicuous surveillance methods are grey zone territory, they themselves need to be monitored especially closely. Those who participate in stalking operations should be subjected to continuous surveillance and should be prompted to provide judicially sound explanations for what they are doing. When a plainclothes police officer runs his car engine for hours outside the house of a gang member at night, he or she should be able to explain how those actions relate to existing European human rights jurisprudence.

These considerations also have geographical dimensions. If a conspicuous surveillance strategy is applied to a case of judicial ambivalence (or to what the police perceive as a judicial vacuum) we are per definition in grey zone territory. Accordingly, if the target of such an operation decides to move geographically – to a new jurisdiction or even to a new country – it goes without saying that the presumption of innocence must be re-established subsequent to that migration and a clean slate offered. Inevitably, the longer the stalking goes on and the wider the area it covers , the more the whole operation assumes the character of a purely extra-judicial punitive act with no preventative dimension whatsoever.

Under no circumstances should a grey-zone, judicially vague (or even extra-judicial) decision from one country serve as basis for the imposition of a global stigma for which individuals are persecuted across the world without once being granted the right to defend themselves before an independent court. It is just plain wrong if the threshold for prosecuting someone in a particular country is higher than for subjecting a person to a global persecution regime based on vague suspicion that has never been tested before any court. If the police choose to create state-sponsored vigilantism, it should at least stay true to the original concept of vigilantism – which may be savage and reactionary, but which at least is limited geographically to a particular location. To use a parallel, declaring someone an outlaw was a common practice in the dark ages. However, medieval culture also had a relatively humane end game in store for outlaws: Exile and a new start.

Finally, it should be an unalienable principle that grey-zone methods like police stalking are only employed as a last resort when other methods that are less invasive in terms of

human rights violations have been exhausted. This is logical both with reference to subsidiarity as a general principle and in view of the basic idea of societal reintegration in modern theories of justice. Indeed, in a number of countries, the police law officially enshrines this kind of gradual approach as a general principle and a duty for the police (Norway being a case in point). There simply cannot be any excuse for making the radical step from vague suspicion to global persecution without even once trying some of the less radical options in the toolbox of the police, including establishing a dialogue through a normal conversation with the suspect. In many cases, a simple verbal warning that a person is about to become the object of the police’s interest would make that person think twice about any unusual activity he or she is engaged in, regardless of whether it can be legally justified or not. No one wants conflict with the police if it can be avoided.

Historical perspective and ways forward In historical perspective, of course, police stalking represents a deplorable step of retrogression from the modern judicial standards that were introduced in the Western world during the age of enlightenment in the eighteenth century. To appreciate just how antiquated some “modern” police stalking methods are, consider the fact that the same French revolutionaries who abolished death penalty by breaking on the wheel (Catherine wheel) limited public shaming offences (e.g. the pillory) to three days maximum.

Contemporary police stalking operations typically go on for months or even years!

It seems clear that this sorry reversion to pre-1789 standards of Western policing was spearheaded by big-city undercover police in Europe and North America in the late twentieth century. It is however with the technological advances of the last decade – perhaps in combination with an increasingly apathetic intellectual class in the post-2001 period – that the most totalitarian variants have been developed. The way politicians in numerous European countries support these new police measures is so pronounced that it satisfies the Orwellian definition of a “bully worship” condition: “Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion.”

It cannot escape notice that many of the countries that practice police stalking have constitutions that are far less explicit in their protection of basic human rights than the French revolutionary charter was. Today, key judicial human-rights concepts such as the presumption of innocence seem to be boilerplate items whenever a third world state turns democratic, but they may well be in need of explicit reinsertion into many “old democracy” constitutions of first-world countries that seem to lazily rely on good reputations instead of actually taking the spirit of the UN and EU human rights articles seriously. In police stalking cases, it is certainly alarming to see how few European

citizens are actually aware that extra-judicial punishment by the police is one of the deadliest sins of the modern democratic and liberal state. You can understand it when people who are in a difficult personal position cooperate with the police since they feel they need a good relationship with them. But that students, the intelligentsia and even people who may talk in academic terms about human rights should be so prepared to participate raises serious question about the current state of Western liberalism.

So far, the literature on police stalking is limited. Only a few cases have been brought before the court (the Netherlands has some examples), and so far the European court of human rights – where these cases rightfully belong – has yet to hear any cases. To some extent, this may be so because stalking victims are unwilling or unable to tell their stories to a wider audience. Also, there appear to be considerable efforts on the part of the police to discredit testimonies from police stalking victims. By way of example, there is a whole genre on the internet devoted to “targeted individuals” which probably includes some real victims of police stalking, but which nonetheless may be dominated by impostors seeking to discredit police stalking victims by including some truly unbelievable elements in their stories. Additionally, these cases of police mistreatment are notoriously difficult to document given the extreme asymmetry between the stalker and the stalking victim in cases where it is a powerful state that is the offender.

Perhaps the best way to study modern police stalking then is through language. In this respect, Northern Europe stands out as having a particular potential because of the marked dualism of the behaviour of the police in these countries. On the one hand, the police forces of several Northern European countries take part in some of the most repressive stalking operations that are known to the Western world. On the other hand, though, those same police forces are eager to come across as democratic and transparent organisations, which means some of their representatives often go on record in public debate and comment on methods used in stalking operations. Through ambiguous, contradictive and sometimes outright stupid comments, these police officers enable a better understanding of how the police-state mentality has managed a surprising comeback in twenty-first century democracies. They should also offer a vantage point for combating this exceptional threat to the proud and modern rule of law tradition.

July 15, 2012

On 10 September 2004, the Dutch minister of justice and internal affairs for the first time told parliament about a new anti-terror method called persoonsgericht verstoren, or “targeted disturbance of an individual”. According to the minister, the goal of the new method was to make the targeted individual, as well as his social environment, aware that s/he was being watched by the government. This, it was suggested, would make the person unusable for terrorist activities.

The Netherlands is just one of many countries that practice police-led disturbance methods or police stalking. However, the Netherlands is perhaps unique in its attempt to create a formal cloak of legality to methods that violate the most basic human rights of Dutch citizens, as defined both by the Dutch constitution as well as by the European convention on human rights. Having initially been justified as a weapon against terrorism, disturbance methods have since been employed against other perceived enemies of the Dutch police – including such diverse groups as football hooligans, dissident academics, the Occupy movement and convicted paedophiles. There has even been talk about expanding the use of disturbance methods further.

Thanks to the Dutch move to formalise certain variants of police stalking, at least some aspects of them are better known than the situation in countries that practice these methods more informally. Dutch police stalking typically involves police cars coming to the house of the stalking victim periodically throughout the day, including at night. In some versions the police also make phone calls or send text messages to the stalking victim repeatedly. A deliberate attempt is made to make family, neighbours and local community aware that the targeted person is being watched by the police. Sometimes “report crime” leaflets are deliberately distributed in the area where the stalking victim lives. A junior variant known since 2006 (and officially called “very irritating police” or “the VIP scheme”) reportedly involves 24/7 stalking of minority youths in big cities like Rotterdam, some of them complaining of being followed “even into MacDonald’s.” Terms like “disturbance project leader” (projectleider verstoren) and “director of disturbances” (verstoringsregisseur) occur in the literature on these operations.

Dutch police stalking methods involve all the usual human rights infractions associated with this policing method more generally. A particularly interesting aspect of the Dutch variant is that high officials from the ministry of justice openly defend the rather blunt infractions on the presumption of innocence that come with the involvement of society at large. This is perhaps inevitable since originally the whole point of the approach is to render the targeted person useless as a potential terrorist, but it does raise some serious privacy issues on top of all the other problems involved in stalking methods. Perhaps unsurprisingly, comments from Dutch judicial experts on the attempt to legalise police stalking have been sharp and unforgiving. In Van nachtbrakers tot terroristen (2006), Jan

Brouwer specifically pointed out that there is no legal cover for persoonsgericht verstoren or similar methods, neither in the Dutch municipalities law nor in the police law (where systematic undercover surveillance must refer to a suspected criminal offense and can only be ordered for 3 months at a time, renewable once by the local representative of the judiciar). Van Kempen and Van de Voort have emphasised problems in relation to European human rights jurisprudence and the very real prospect that the European court of human rights may rule against Dutch practices on persoonsgericht verstoren. Cees Nierop and Jacco Snoeijer go even further and say that disturbance actions by the police directly violate the Dutch anti-stalking law (article 285b of the Dutch penal code). Article 285 b emphasises regular and deliberate disturbance of another person’s life. In fact, the discussion by MP Dittrich of D66 during the introduction of the anti-stalking law to the Dutch parliament on 1 September 1999 captures perfectly the actual modalities of police stalking: Continued persecution no matter where the stalking victim chooses to live and work and regardless of what means of transport he or she is using. Of course, to some extent the responsibility of implementing the stalking is spread on a larger number of people in police stalking, and not everyone in society at large may satisfy the criterion of regular participation (although repeat offenders probably will). However, in practice the stalking has been organised by a limited number of police officers who may legally be considered the stalkers-in-chief. In cases of police stalking that are officially recognised as persoonsgericht verstoren the mayor also has a specific responsibility. Dutch law stipulates a maximum jail penalty of 3 years for stalking; according to Nierop, Snoeijer and others, police stalking is just as illegal, criminal and prosecutable as other offenses under the Dutch penal code.

Further problems can be identified by looking in greater detail at what exactly Dutch police stalking methods involve.

According to the theory presented by the justice minister to parliament, enhanced and conspicuous “observation” of an individual was the central aim (in de gaten houden).

Lots of police cars and uniforms on the street where the targeted person lives can of course achieve this. But details from court cases on police stalking divulge more details about what is going on. In one case involving a suspected female Islamist in Amsterdam, it was revealed that police cars would stop outside the house of the stalking victim for several minutes, including during the night. It was emphasised in the court case that the police cars repeatedly stopped but kept their engines running for a long time so that they made a lot of noise. Why would it be necessary for the police to keep their motors running if the aim of police stalking was primarily to “observe”?

Possibly, the correct answer was given not by the justice minister to the parliament, but by a Dutch police officer in an interview with a Norwegian police student in 2009. In the

resultant thesis, the Norwegian police student – who was clearly not aware that Norwegian police themselves use police stalking – described his conversation with the Dutch police officer as follows: “One of the Dutch police departments described a controversial disturbance project… This was directed at people… who could not be prosecuted. These were subjected to continuous, and, at least to the targeted individuals, conspicuous surveillance… The goal of the police was to be “a pain in the ass” according to one of the officers”… This preventative method is described in the Dutch action plan as a grey-zone tool that can be employed against people who engage in socially unacceptable behaviour that does not lend itself to prosecution”.

The Dutch police officer in question, whose name was not given in the thesis, worked at a police unit in an unspecified big city with regional undercover tasks aimed at terrorism and organised crime. The city had already experienced Islamic terrorism, so presumably this refers to Amsterdam, The Hague or Rotterdam. The unit is likely a so-called criminele inlichtingen eenheid.

So, “pain in the ass” for those who commit actions that are legal “but socially unacceptable? Here the Dutch police are infringing on areas that in normal democracies are taken care of by penitentiary institutions and priests and philosophers respectively. In a modern rechtsstaat, it simply isn’t the job of the police to vindictively mete out punishments or to define criminality beyond the parameters of the laws on the books. But that is precisely what the Dutch police are doing through their stalking efforts. Details from a court case from 2005 even enumerates the fact that a Muslim woman began wearing hijab among the list of suspicions that eventually prompted the authorities to officially launch a stalking operation against her as a potential Islamic terrorist!

By 2012, minority groups ranging from football hooligans to Occupy Eindhoven were targeted by Dutch police stalkers. There is however perhaps one case where stalking methods have been employed where a degree of sympathy for the actions of the Dutch police is possible: A case from Amsterdam where a convicted paedophile was clearly trying to resume contact with young children. In this case, the preventative dimension

seems acute, serious and relevant. Nonetheless, in a principled rechtsstaat it would be preferable to codify the stalking regime as part of the punishment instead, to be decided by the court as a possible added punishment, rather than letting police apply it arbitrarily and without reference to judicial authorities.

And thus police stalking appears to be spreading in the Netherlands. What was originally crafted as an anti-terrorism tool has evidently found other uses as well. Or maybe the politically approved label persoonsgericht verstoren is now being used to cover a wider range of informal stalking methods that were already in use? Perhaps we should not be so shocked though. Despite a reasonable reputation, Dutch police officers are frequently seen on YouTube videos beating up demonstrators that seem mostly peaceful. There is no independent police commission, and the special unit within the police dealing with police cases – the Rijksrecherche – is secretive it its proceedings, often unresponsive to the general public and exonerates the police in the majority of cases, including those leading to deaths. Emblematic of the situation in the Netherlands, the police there has been more successful than others in defining “police violence” as violence by and against the police.

Violence by the police is found to be “proportionate” more often than not.

Unconventional, societal punishment appears to sit well with some spokespeople of the Dutch police. By way of example, the police has asked that people who have shown aggression towards emergency personnel be “isolated socially”. Measures suggested by police union leader Jan Willem van de Pol include preventing offenders from buying KLM tickets and being members of sports clubs! Van de Pol openly admits that his proposal amounts to extra-judicial procedure since the idea apparently was that the measures would be applied retroactively to past offenders, and merrily refers to his initiative as a citizens rights protest (burgerrechtelijk protest, see De Telegraaf, 6 December 2011.) For their part, in 2011 the police in Amsterdam celebrated the arrest of the thousandth pickpocket for the year by putting a 1,000 number sign on her jacket, whereupon she was photographed by the press (De Telegraaf, 18 October 2011). More generally, one senses a degree of police populism in the Netherlands through initiatives like Burgernet (citizens can sign up to be “the eyes and ears of the police) and the widespread presence on Twitter of individual police officers, tweeting in an official capacity.

Right-leaning elements within the Dutch government also play a certain role in this. The justice and security minister recently suggested preventive pre-trial action against potential repeat offenders while at the same time strenuously trying contend that the defendant was, in fact, treated as innocent until proven guilty (NRC 7 February 2012)! That contradiction sounds very reminiscent of the hollow discourse of previous government ministers in defence of the persoonsgericht verstoren variant of police stalking. Rightists in parliament, too, have at times gone out on an anti human rights limp (NRC 26 February

2012). And, to be fair, support for police methods verging on extra-legal punishment is not exclusively a right-wing affair in the Netherlands. Back in 2006, the Dutch Labour party publicly demanded more money to the police for the purpose of stalking (hinderlijk volgen) potential thiefs (NRC, 10 November 2006).

Similarly, the presumption of innocence often gets short shrift in Dutch media and culture more broadly. Suspects are identified in the media by first name and family name initial even at the pre-trial stage. Media often publishes full photos of suspects with only a thin pencil line drawn over the eyes. When specific information about occupation, business affiliation and place of living are also circulated, the chances of sentencing by media are considerable. The judicial vocabulary of the Dutch press also sometimes verges on the medieval, with concepts like “witch” (heks) sometimes used about mere suspects (De Telegraaf, 16 December, 2011)..

Perhaps in line with these broader societal trends, the Dutch judiciary has yet to show the courage to strike down persoonsgericht verstoren as a concept. Instead, in at least one case from Amsterdam in 2005 it has ruled that the amount of stalking was disproportionate and that it should be discontinued for that reason. Conversely, though, in 2006 another police stalking operation in Amsterdam was ruled to be “proportional” by the court.

The Netherlands should however take heed of how other Europeans view their police stalking practices. In 2009, subsequent to his inspection visit in 2008, the European commissioner for human rights issued a strongly worded warning that the Dutch police stalking practices were problematic in light of European human rights standards. Maybe a defeat at the European court of human rights in Strasbourg is what the Netherlands needs to clean up its act on police stalking. There is an increasing number of cases to choose from.

July 15, 2012

[This article is also available in Norwegian/norsk tekst her: https://policestalking.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/politistalking-i-norge-fotfolging/] Unlike the Netherlands, Norway has not officially formalised police stalking as a method.

Nonetheless, through the use of language, creative officials have been successful in finding terms that sound sufficiently palatable to the general public to make police stalking a widespread but so far under-reported practice.

The most common Norwegian term for police stalking is fotfølging. This is almost synonymous with “tailing” in English but it literally means “step by step pursuit”, which is not an altogether unfair description of how some of these stalking operations work in practice. It should be noted that in Norwegian media, this term has sometimes also been loosely applied to a different form of policing that strictly speaking isn’t stalking: The so-called Very Important Criminal (VIC) scheme in Oslo dating back to around 2005, which was not really about stalking but rather a sort of fast-tracking of repeat offenders.

These were not necessarily subjected to more undercover surveillance than anyone else, but when they did get caught an effort was made to produce a judgment as early as possible.

It is the second and more widespread use of fotfølging – stalking of individuals who may never be prosecuted – that should give cause for concern. This is so because unlike the fast tracking scheme, this kind of police stalking does the opposite of implementing rule of law principles – it violates and undermines them instead. The term largely replaces the cruder and less technological variant of undercover work previously described as “disturbance activities” or urovirksomhet. Prior to 2005, this had been mostly focused on the drugs scene in the big cities.

Police stalking and Norwegian law Unlike the situation in the Netherlands, Norway does not have a specific legally defined limit on how much (or little) undercover activity the police can do, or how long it can go on. However, In 2004, a group of government-appointed legal experts concluded that as the very minimum, undercover police activity should relate to a punishable offence (NOU 6 2004). Accordingly, then, conspicuous surveillance for the sake of conspicuousness alone does not seem permissible. The same report also indicated that the intensity of the undercover activity should be proportionate to the seriousness of the suspected crime and indicated that excessive undercover activity could be challenged under article 8 of the European convention on human rights. Also, more invasive forms of undercover activity (hidden video surveillance, the use of beacon or tracking devices etc.) are regulated in considerable detail, with requirements that the application of such methods must increase the likelihood of solving a serious crime or prevent a serious crime from taking place.

Moreover, although the Norwegian penal code is extremely general and vague with respect to stalking-like situations, there is a very specific paragraph on psychological torture

committed by civil servants in article 117a which stipulates a maximum penalty of 15 years’ imprisonment for a public servant inflicting “serious… psychological pain…with the intention of punishing, threaten or force someone”. Reflecting the seriousness of potential abuse of state power, this is in fact one of the gravest crimes defined under the Norwegian penal code, with a 15 years maximum prison sentence.

Fragmentary evidence from known cases of police stalking suggests Norwegian police are going much further than the rough parameters outlined in the report on police methods in 2004. By way of example, in 2008, football hooligans from Bergen complained they were being literally tailed by police on a daily basis from the second they left home and until they returned (BT, 8 May 2008). This happened even as the hooligans were not under investigation for a specific crime; their belonging to a group of hooligans with a bad reputation was sufficient for the police to stalk them for long periods. Similar operations have been seen against Pakistani gangs and bikers in Oslo. In 2008 it was reported that the Oslo police stalked Pakistani gangs so intensely that they began holding meetings in the forest instead – whereupon the police demanded funding for vehicles capable of tracking them there as well (Aftenposten, 21 December 2008).

As in the case of the Netherlands, perhaps the language of the police themselves may be even more revealing as to what is really going on in these operations. When the “gang project” of the Oslo police was initiated in 2006, the police themselves openly admitted fear that their methods would be seen as overly aggressive and that harassment lawsuits would ensue. Another police source indicated that the stalking methods were sufficiently aggressive that they would not employ them to “harass (herse med) tired drug addicts” (Aftenposten 10 June 2009).

The language of the Norwegian police is particularly central to understanding the aims of their stalking operations. Eirik Jensen of the organised crime unit in Oslo has repeatedly declared the desire to marginalise gang members to the point where they are considered as “afflicted with lepers” (Aftenposten, 10 May 2007 ). The targets in these operations are often minorities and the police emphasises their minority status in language, using terms such as “one per cent MC circles”. Also, operations with a stalking element frequently have codenames that are vindictive in character, as for example the “Nemesis” operation in Brazil against Norwegian exiles (including gang members) as well as “operation homeless” – a scheme supposedly targeting the customer of prostitutes and pimps but in reality hitting the prostitutes hardest and forcing many of them out of their homes.

A look at the leadership of units of the Norwegian police involved in stalking The largely undercover organised crime unit in Oslo is probably the most frequent

Norwegian user of police stalking methods. In terms of personnel, this unit of the Oslo police seems to function as a magnet on Norwegian police officers and police lawyers who offer unusual interpretations of laws in force and often seek to push the boundaries.

One example is Tom Østreng, who came to the unit after having served as police chief in one of Oslo’s suburbs. His previous career received much media attention due to a series of remarkable decisions on fighter dogs. His aim was apparently to destroy as many specimens as possible, although the rules at the time were unclear, as he himself admitted.

In this situation of legal haze Østreng declared that the police had the “authority to use discretion” in selecting which dogs should live and which should die, and this was apparently done on the basis of the characteristics of their owners (crudely defined as criminals versus good citizens, see Aftenposten Aften, 13 November 2002). In another incident, Østreng’s men effectively sealed off entire neighbourhoods in an Oslo suburb without any specific suspicion directed against anyone – much to the inconvenience of local residents, and with the sole intention of showing off (Lokalavisen Stovner, 17 November 2003).

Both examples illustrate problems with concepts like equality before the law and the presumption of innocence among people who are now leading officers in the organised crime unit in Oslo. Another prominent organised crime unit officer, Harald Bøhler, has played a central role in the anti-prostitution project of the Oslo police in recent years. So far, the project has been characterised by complaints about aggressive methods, a mixed record of actually being able to reduce sex trade, and some rather blunt prosecution failures. In one attempted pilot case, Bøhler innovatively tried to define porn magazines with sex advertisements as “online brothels” and therefore generically liable to

prosecution as pimps. The attempt was firmly struck down by the Norwegian supreme court (VG, 28 October 2011). Another such interesting case involved the telecommunications giant Telenor, where Bøhler referred not to the law but to “societal responsibility” as a reason why Telenor should block access to a foreign-based website which is involved in Norwegian prostitution. Bøhler’s argument was apparently based on the reasoning that every single case of prostitution might theoretically reflect or somehow be related to the far more serious crime of human trafficking (VG 19 June 2011). As for police methods, one eyebrow-raising technique used by Bøhler is to confiscate the cell phones of prostitutes and then use them in sting operations with potential customers (VG, 16 September 2009). He has also been at the forefront complaining about restrictions on eavesdropping regulations regarding private cars.

The bigger point in this series of remarkable anti-prostitution actions is that it could well be argued that some of the reported behaviour of the organised crime unit and its anti-prostitution squad is so aggressive towards the prostitutes and house owners (who have been “encouraged” to terminate the tenancies of prostitutes) that it could be prosecuted as psychological threats under article 117a of the Norwegian penal code (for a description of typical police behaviour see “Lovendring redder ingen”, Aftenposten, 20

November 2008). Those very same points could in fact be made for many of the other organised crime unit operations as well, but the anti-prostitution project is best known since the Oslo police brags about their efforts at international conferences.

Many of the same tendencies can be glanced from police lawyers affiliated with the organised crime unit. A relatively recent member of the unit, Jorid Kile Berg, debuted as an official of the prosecution in 1999 with extensive accusations of paedophilia on the Philippines against a Norwegian school teacher that were so weak that even former police officers criticised them (Dagbladet, 23 February 1999). In that case, Kile Berg wanted to get the suspect behind bars for 4 weeks but the court snubbed her with one week only and a subsequent release. Nonetheless, the damage to the social reputation of the teacher based on the arbitrary arrest had already been done. Much later, Kile Berg was successful in prosecuting to conviction a notorious paedophile known as the Pocket Man, although during the course of the process there were loud complaints from the family of the accused that they too had been targeted by the police. There was also media criticism of the extensive attempts by Kile Berg to highlight previous wrongdoing by the man which was no longer directly relevant because the judicial time limit for prosecuting those offenses had expired long ago.

Finally, special mention should be made of the previous head of a specialised undercover unit within the organised crime section, Eirik Jensen. Jensen is rarely specific about what exactly the police are up to during stalking operations, but he uses terms like ”pressure” and “stress” almost all the time. A previous official of a unit dealing with motorcycle clubs, he is believed to have been a leading force in devising the undercover work of the organised crime unit from 2005 until today. One report relating to this unit describes a strategy of arresting family members for the primary aim of terrifying them into believing association with criminals is a “risk sport” (Aftenposten, 10 May 2007). Jensen is currently special adviser to the head of the organised crime unit, Einar Aas. Aas has given a few media interviews which stand out chiefly for the fact that he uses regular judicial references sparingly and instead seems to prefer naval warfare ones (Motgift, no. 3, 2010).

Together, these examples show how leading officials at the organised crime unit in Oslo are in the habit of being extremely selective and arbitrary in their choice of targets, and then pursue them relentlessly, often to the point where it seems legal standards come under threat. Not that the organised crime unit is alone among the Norwegian police in setting basic judicial principles to one side, though. The outgoing chief of police in Oslo, Anstein Gjengedal, once declared his desire to see every member of Pakistani gangs behind bars, apparently quite regardless of their actual involvement in specific crimes. Round’em up!

For their part, nifty police lawyers in Trondheim at one point proposed to share

information about prostitute clients with employers (Adresseavisen, 3 December 2009), whereas Atle Roll Mathiesen, previously head of the organised crime section of the prestigious Kripos (Norway’s national and centralised criminal investigative unit) has reportedly joined colleagues in the Oslo police in publicly calling for exclusion measures directed against bikers.

The Norwegian political establishment favours police stalking At times, the Norwegian judiciary has done a good job of reining in some of the excesses of the Oslo organised crime unit, with dismissals of several cases. On the other hand, though, Norwegian bureaucrats and politicians appear less capable of putting up resistance. Quite the opposite, in fact. Too often, the judicial committee of the Norwegian parliament – dominated by the strong personality of Jan Bøhler of the Labour party – yields to proposals from Harald Bøhler and others in the organised crime unity demanding wider police authorities or procedures (see for example VG, 31 May 2012). For his part, the previous minister of justice, Knut Storberget, failed to provide a clear and negative answer when Trondheim police floated the idea of sharing information about offenders against the anti-prostitution law with employers (Stortinget, document 15:143 2009–10).

It was actually an opposition politician from the far-right FrP that had to travel to Brazil to try to clean up after Operation Nemesis, which had apparently involved illegal information sharing between the Oslo police and their Brazilian counterparts (Dagbladet, 2 June 2010).

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Norwegian police directorate – created in 2001 and until March 2011 under the leadership of former police chief of Oslo, Ingelin Killengreen – rarely acts as an effective check on the ambitions of the police. Quite the contrary, in its commentary on questions such as the right of bikers to wear MC emblems at bars and restaurants (which the police tried to ban), the directorate comes across as surprisingly ignorant of the conflict between the police’s ideas and basic European human rights principles (see in particular letter from the police directorate to the police in Haugesund dated 5 January 2012). Conversely, the opponents of the directorate – in this case the motorcycle club Hells Angels – are often those who set out reasonable interpretations in these matters. Regarding the MC emblems, Hells Angels argued for a principled interpretation of constitutional and European human rights jurisprudence on non-discrimination, and eventually hired a widely respected Norwegian lawyer who concluded he agreed with them (just as the Swedish supreme court had previously also argued for non-discrimination). But then again, Killengreen, the director of the police, has personally suggested that the police should cooperate with insurance companies, municipalities and even restaurants to combat MC gangs, apparently disregarding entirely the right of bikers to enjoy the same privacy and perfect equality before the law as other

citizens (Politiets fellesforbund, 8 February 2011).

It may be tempting to ascribe the evolvement of authoritarian policing styles in Norway to the post-911 years from 2001 onwards, but in fact it goes further back – at least to the 1980s when Willy Haugli was police chief in Oslo. However, it was only during his media-savvy and politically well-connected successor in the 1990s, Ingelin Killengreen, that large-scale human rights transgressions by the Norwegian police seemed to acquire a degree of acceptability in political circles. Perhaps the best example is the infamous China state visit in 1996, when Killengreen basically applied Chinese rules to public demonstrations in Oslo for a day. The fact that Killengreen managed to keep her position after that blunder amounted to a considerable defeat for human rights proponents in Norway. Another noteworthy pre-2001 development was the expansion of police powers to include more secret undercover methods when Odd Einar Dørum was minister of justice in 1999. Representing Venstre, the most purely liberal party in Norwegian politics, Dørum and his support for more police powers is perhaps the best example that it is not only the dominant Labour party that gets involved in symbiotic relationships with leaders of the police in Norway. In an angry but prophetic editorial dated 4 May 1999, Dagbladet savaged the remarkable cave-in by Venstre to a big brother type society.

Whereas the post-2001 climate saw expansion of police powers worldwide, in Norway it was not really until around 2005 that the character of Oslo policing methods changed in a big way. In this period, the partnership of Killengreen at the police directorate and Eirik Jensen in the newly constituted organised crime unit of the Oslo police seemed to play a dynamo role. A further step towards ever more totalitarian forms of policing came with a lethal shooting episode in 2006 where gang members briefly fought an armed battle in the middle of one of Oslo’s most celebrated promenades, Aker Brygge. Subsequent to this incident (and the shock it evidently produced in the political class), Oslo police were increasingly given a free hand to deal with the gangs as they saw fit. What they asked for in terms of resources they generally got. By 2007, Jensen could count on unlimited parliamentary and financial support, and few questions were being asked with reference to his gang-busting activities (Aftenposten, 26 May 2007).

In this way, there is a very direct link from the yellow pro-Tibet t-shirt wearers who were rounded up by Oslo police in 1996 during the attempted China demonstrations to the debate about the right to wear motorcycle gang emblems in recent years. How utterly ahistorical that a country where Nazism was defeated during the Second World War by people wearing caps and clips in their jackets as symbols of resistance should allow crude attacks on these softest forms of free expression only a half century later!

Perhaps more fundamentally, it is impossible to decouple the worrying trend of widespread police stalking from other trends indicating systemic problems in the Norwegian judicial system. Above all, the overuse of pre-trial detention – criticised repeatedly by the UN and Amnesty – stands out. For its position as a leading country in the world of democracies, Norway has a surprisingly bad record of putting people behind bars for no good reason. Hopefully, greater awareness about police stalking can help put on the agenda these more deep-rooted systemic problems in the Norwegian judicial system when it comes to dealing with the presumption of innocence, which after all is considered one of the most important pillars of modern Western judicial philosophy.

[This article is also available in Norwegian/norsk tekst her: https://policestalking.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/politistalking-og-fotfolgingpa-internasjonal-skala-et-eksempel-fra-norge/] One police stalking case of Norwegian origin that deserves mention for its peculiarity more than for its representativeness relates to an academic who has been persecuted for his research project since February 2011. The case shows not only how police stalking can subvert so many judicial principles that the very idea of rule of law is under threat; it also demonstrates how stalking methods may lead the police very far away from common police tasks, to the point where their obsession with performing stalking activities detracts from their performance and takes attention away from real criminal threats, including terrorism-related ones. The case shows how the Norwegian police first invent laws of their own, then go on to apply them unevenly, and finally are using them to persecute dissident academics extra-judicially. It also involves extremes as far as duration and intensity are concerned: 24/7 in more than one and a half year, with extensive use of sleep deprivation against an individual with a known case of inflammatory bowel disease.

The stalking victim in this case was an academic who lived in Oslo. He was an historian and most of his published work related to the Middle East. For health reasons he could not travel as much to the region as he wanted, so he developed a sociological project on fashion history as an aside to his Middle East research. The main focus was the tug of war between designers and customers through the medium of street fashion, and in particular how certain basic clothes and brands often trump designer fashion, creating popular (and often regional or national) prototypes of stereotypical street fashion “looks” that typically last much longer than the annual fashion seasons – sometimes surviving for more than 5 years. He collected images for the project by periodically taking pictures on his mobile phone of people on the street who fitted the criteria for prototype inclusion, mostly in Oslo. Other than the prototype criteria, there was no attempt to establish the identity of the people on the images, and no person was photographed on more than a single occasion.

The images were collected for a future book project where it was essential to have images of “ordinary people” instead of fashion bloggers since those who blog about fashion are often unrepresentative in that they listen more to designers than average people. Having used photographs as an historian throughout his career, he had previously collected a far greater number of “street photography” images from a Middle Eastern port city in the 1920s from antiquariat sources.

Police making up the rules: Mobile photography, the law, and human rights The legal framework governing photography in public areas is pretty much the same in Norway as in the rest of the Western world – photography is considered permitted in publicly accessible areas unless expressly forbidden. The Norwegian penal code has only one specific mention of photography and that relates to the commercial exploitation of child pornography. Each major city also has separate police regulations, but again the relevant ones for Oslo – which cover every conceivable problem under the sun ranging from skateboarding to loud song performances – has no mention of photography. When photography is forbidden in Norway, there will typically be a sign saying so, most often in the vicinity of security installations or military areas. A proposal to make certain types of privacy-invading photography illegal (such as taking photographs by peeping inside a private home) was shelved by Norwegian parliamentarians in the 1970s.

Reflecting this state of affairs, the Norwegian code on police methods, which goes into considerable details regarding things like video recordings from hidden devices, does not say anything about photography at all, again indicating that the police can take photographs as much as they want simply because everybody can. This interpretation was specifically confirmed by a group of Norwegian legal experts who wrote a critical treatise on police methods in light of European standards on privacy in 2004 (NOU 6/2004). Senior officials of the Norwegian police mostly accept these principles even in cases that more conservative observers would consider as privacy infractions, as seen for example in comments by police lawyer Tor Henning Knudsen in 2003 relating to so-called “candid” streetshots from Oslo (the lawfulness of the photography itself was not disputed and the act of publication considered lawful because no identifiable faces were shown, Dagbladet, 11 June 2003), and again by Trondheim police in relation to a case involving someone photographing naked children using special equipment in July 2010 (specficially describing the act of photography as lawful but indicating concerns regarding publication, Adresseavisen, 31 July 2010). There is even a ruling from Oslo district court as recently as early 2009 which specifically confirmed the right of citizens to make photographs with their mobile phones in public areas (the police had tried to fine a lawyer who photographed them, TV2, 6 February 2009).

In line with this relatively liberal approach, conviction of photographers by Norwegian courts are few and far between, mostly limited to very obvious infractions of privacy in the most intimate ways imaginable. A ruling from Bergen from 2006 on indecent behaviour involved a large number of so-called “up-skirt” photographs as well as a photo of a semi-naked teenage girl in a dressing room (summary of the case in BA, 30 November 2011). Another ruling from Hamar in 2009 involved beach photographies including topless images that were subsequently uploaded to an explicitly pornographic website.

Finally, in an extraordinary case from Sunndal involving a gynecologist surreptitiously photographing a large number of women during consultations, a fine of 25,000 kroner (USD 4,000) was imposed in 2010. The case seemed to involve grotesque privacy violations in a number of ways: The extreme asymmetry of power, speaking both physically (the fully clad doctor versus the naked women in stirrups) and psychologically (the unchallengeable authority that many associate with a doctor versus the difficult position of the women who may have been worried and were seeking advice for a health problem that made them uneasy in the first place); the exceptional invasion of privacy (the photographs covered mainly the genitalia of the women); the absence of anonymity (the doctor named files according to the personal names of the patients); a very high number of this kind of intimate photographs (2,000 plus). The slight reaction by the judiciary in terms of a heavy fine seems to verge on the over-permissive. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that it came after the national prosecutor had intervened (the case was first dismissed by the district prosecutor who considered the images non-pornographic). In other words, if the Norwegian judiciary had wanted to send a strong signal about mobile photography in the period it was involved with that case (2007-2011), it had a golden opportunity to do so – but eventually refrained from imposing a heavier punishment.

The Norwegian situation reflects European conditions and interpretations more broadly. In Denmark, photography is expressly prohibited only with reference to military sites and if attempts are made to take photographs of people who are beyond areas of public access (penal code 264a). In 2006, the Swedish supreme court went as far as dismissing an attempted case against a person who had secretly videotaped naked adults in private gardens (including in intimate situations), arguing that these persons could not have been the victim of an offense as long as they did not know about the filming and only found out afterwards (Sydsvenskan, 15 November 2006). Clearly this decision may come across as overly liberal in light of the private-home red line indicated by the European court of human rights, but it does show just how liberal European judiciaries can be when it comes to photography. Swedish police reiterated this line in 2009 when they declared lawful the photography of thousands of Swedes on the beach (including naked ones) by way of concealed equipment and subsequent uploads of the images to a semi-pornographic website (Expressen, Helsingborg Dagblad, 19 july 2009).

In the Netherlands, one can sometimes find signs indicating explicit prohibition of photography, for example in public toilets. Only cases involving massive privacy violations, such as filming seriously ill people inside a hospital and then publishing the material on TV without their consent, have led to court cases. The European human rights court generally confirmed these interpretations in a ruling related to Austria (Friedl vs Austria), where photography by police of demonstrations was acknowledged as rightful and where it was maintained that privacy rights in the European convention on human rights primarily concerned the right of the individual to “fully be himself or herself� in

private areas like a home (in Swedish, cases involving privacy violations are literally called “violation of freedom of the home” or hemfridsbrott.) The UK and the United States go even further in seeing the right to photograph almost anything in public as part of freedom of expression. The London Metropolitan Police explicitly says it cannot stop any photographic activity (the discussion includes mobile phones) except if it relates to an act of terrorism.

In the United States, restrictions on photography mainly relate to grey-zone areas that are technically speaking public, but where a degree of privacy is expected – above all restrooms and locker rooms, with an emphasis on outlawing photography of the private parts of the body. Similar legislation has been passed in Australia and New Zealand (also referred to as anti-voyeurism legislation). New Zealand stands out as a country whose politicians have deliberated these issues at length before arriving at the conclusion that nudity constitutes the red line that can be meaningfully enforced. In a unique case, New Zealand in 2005 prosecuted a person for non-nude photography, in a case involving a large number of high school girls photographed on their way to school (The Queen vs Rowe, 2005). The verdict of indecent behaviour, which went all the way to the supreme court, emphasised the elaborately concealed method for making the photographies (the photographer was hidden behind curtains in a caravan) as well as the absence of a legitimate purpose. However, legal experts in New Zealand today consider this case as an outlier, not least since the same person was acquitted in a second, separate case by the high court later in 2005 for photographing a number of young women in a public library, which was seen as “strange but not indecent” (New Zealand Herald, 17 December 2005).

This kind of photographic liberalism has in many countries been corroborated by the photographic activities of the state itself. Consider TV programmes of the Candid Camera kind. Norway had a state-sponsored incarnation called Smil til det skjulte kamera, in which thousands of Norwegians were filmed (and often broadcast), sometimes in unpleasant situations orchestrated by the production teams.

In short, in Norway as well as in Europe and the Western world more broadly, photography is accepted in ways it is not in many Islamic countries, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Sudan.

In Qatar, tourist information leaflets specifically say visitors must ask permission before photographing anyone, especially women. In Sudan you need a government permit for taking any photos. Norway is not Sudan.

The one area of European (and Western) human rights jurisprudence that could conceivably be of relevance in this case relates to stalking. However, the existing laws on stalking in several countries invariably confirm that a single act of photography of a particular stranger is not stalking. Almost every law on stalking requires regularity and

duration in harassment that targets a specific individual, and certainly that whatever unwanted attention is involved takes place more than once (examples include Italy, Belgium and England & Wales). In general, the modern judicial interpretation of stalking does not emphasise the original, medieval meaning of the term (“to move stealthily”).

Whereas this concept can be form in colloquial expressions relating to photography across Europe (snikfotografering in Norwegian or smygfotografering in Swedish); it is simply not reflected by any legal category apart from those relating to either repeated harassment or privacy invasion in the sense of the private home or the naked body.

In fact, it seems that sometimes, Norwegian police are actually prepared to accept a lot more than other countries in terms of people watching and photographing each other. In a remarkable case, it was revealed in 2011 that a Norwegian security company had not only photographed visitors and people who came to the US embassy in Oslo (the monitoring was done on behalf of the Americans), but also kept files in which people were identified and their political affiliations analysed. Despite this project going much further than the fashion history project of the stalking victim, Oslo police officially concluded that the eager embassy watchers were simply engaged in “observation” (rather than “surveillance”) and as such could do what they did because everybody can. No police action against the group was seen as mandated (Aftenposten 10 December 2010; NRK 19 January 2011).

An extra-judicial, punitive police operation Perhaps a key to understanding the differences in the Norwegian police response to the fashion history project and the embassy watchers is the realisation that the people who participated in the embassy area photography came from particular backgrounds: Some of them were former police. On the other hand, the fashion historian who was targeted had no such privileged links and although his work was significantly less invasive in terms of violating anyone’s privacy (no establishing of identity etc.) Oslo police decided to declare his activities a nuisance and to go after him, extra-judicially and informally with stalking methods. They did so without ever asking him a single question as to the reasons for his photography and they never once indicated that he should stop – meaning that in addition to administering a punishment for a perceived offense against which no Norwegian law existed, they also violated the Norwegian police law which establishes subsidiarity and gradualness as mandatory for any kind of repressive action by the police.

In fact, the only infraction of the Norwegian penal code involved in the case was the punitive action of the police, which should be punishable under article 117a on psychological torture – defined through attempts by a government official to inflict psychological pain on someone with a view to punish, threaten or force that individual.

Prior to commencement of the punitive measures in February 2011, traditional undercover

methods had been used for several months to establish the identity of the academic in question. It is believed a considerable number of “sting incidents” took place in which the police recruited people to serve as potential “motives” for the photographer, except that they could not arrest him since he had done nothing against the law. The operation then began on 12 February 2011. After never having had anything to do with the police in his whole life, the academic was stopped by a police patrol in broad daylight in Oslo and subjected to a search and ID check, supposedly related to a knife episode on the tram. The episode was a bogus incident staged by the police, but the academic at first did not understand it. However, in the following days he noticed that police cars began following him on his way to and from work (where he did most of his photography in broad daylight), and he noticed people who looked like undercover police tailing him into shops.

He became suspicious of all the police activity and the stalking and decided to stop taking pictures since that was the sole activity he was engaged in that was even remotely out of the ordinary.

However, once the academic stopped taking pictures, the police intensified their stalking efforts. A brigade of 10-20 unmarked police cars, easily identifiable by their license plates, began following his every move and accompanied him each day as he went on foot to work. At night, the same cars would encircle his exposed flat, making excessive noise in the previously quiet street and using their horns all the time. Sometimes they were joined by marked police cars who would put their sirens on briefly as they passed his flat. When he went to bed, one of the cars would park right outside his window with its motor running for long periods, sometimes more than an hour, making it quite impossible for him to get an average of more than 4 hours of very interrupted sleep per day at most. At his workplace the police replicated the noise harassment by using unmarked police cars. As if to underline the connection to his photographic activities, some of the undercover officers began conspicuously photographing him on his way to and from work, often by taking flash photography in the dark when the photographic result in itself was unlikely to be of much value.

The Oslo apartment where the police mistreatment went on in February and March 2011 The most aggravating element of the harassment operation was the sleep deprivation. The academic suffered from multiple chronic diseases including ulcerative colitis. With massive dehydration from being waked up so often he developed additional injuries to his intestinal tract. After having endured the cruel operation for 4 weeks and having also made some experimental attempts to travel domestically within in Norway (including to Asker and to Bergen), he realised he was being followed everywhere and that the police stalking operation against him applied nationally. Given the repeated use of mobile photography on the part of some of the undercover agents, he was by now convinced that the photographs were the reason for the harassment and that he was the victim of an extra-judicial punishment process – incidentally the kind of judicial problem he had previously tackled in detail in his work on rule of law issues in the Middle East. Even if there had been a desire to prosecute him on some kind of far-fetched basis, the prospects for a fair trial by now seemed irreparably damaged in light of 4 weeks of mistreatment and gross human violations by the Norwegian police.

Going extra-territorial: Norwegian cops instigating human rights violations abroad Since the nature of his work was international, the academic decided to leave Norway instead of pursuing the uphill struggle of protesting the mistreatment. On 22 March 2011,

he travelled from Bergen to Schiphol airport in the Netherlands and then continued to London in order to find a flat there. However, to his surprise, he discovered that he was being followed by Norwegian undercover agents. In London, the group of Norwegian police were able to instigate similar actions by the Metropolitan police that he had been subjected to in Norway, with noisy police cars and foot patrol agents tailing him everywhere at daytime and deliberately disturbing his sleep at night at the hotel where he was staying. Exhausted and desperate, he left for the United States on 25 March, but discovered that 3 identifiable Norwegian police officers came with him on flight CO 111.

On arrival in Newark, the group was joined by more Norwegian police officers (whom he recognised from the harassment patrols in Oslo) who had landed concurrently with him en route from Norway, most likely on the SAS flight from Copenhagen or the direct Continental flight from Oslo. A substantial number of the police officers were identifiable members of the organised crime unit within the Oslo police, which specialises in undercover work including police stalking.

From late March to early May 2011, the academic stayed in the United States in the hope that the federal structure of that country would make it more complicated for Norwegian police to instigate and conduct illegal extra-judicial punishment of him across a number of administrative jurisdictions. However, this failed. Whereas the sleep deprivation in the United States was significantly less severe than in Norway, both Norwegian agents and US police would harass him throughout the day, including inside academic libraries at Princeton and Harvard. The stalking victim was able to identify a group of 10 to 15 Norwegian officers who arrived with him in Newark, with somewhat smaller numbers in Washington DC and Boston, and then another big group of maybe 10 officers in Seattle from 26 April to 3 May. To his despair, the academic realised the Norwegian-led police operation was able to penetrate the most prestigious of US government institutions to continue the harassment.

He had hoped the fact that he had previously been useful to the US government, including the CIA, might be of help. But to no avail. On 19 April 2011, the US police sent a person from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency as a bogus participant at a CIA workshop in Virginia where the stalking victim gave a presentation on Mahdism. In one of the most surrealistic CIA versus FBI scenes ever, the NGIA person asked questions that almost seemed calculated to come across as weird and somewhat off-topic, thereby distracting a $50,000 CIA event for the sake of a Norwegian-led harassment operation. On 22 April, the academic lunched with State Department officials including an assistant under secretary of state at the National Press Club, only to find that the police staged excessive and prolonged flash photography exactly in the area where he was busy offering advice to the US government during a crucial period of transition in the Persian Gulf region. At a State Department briefing the same week, a police officer from the State Department security unit came and demonstratively sat next to him as he was discussing

with members of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in a public area.

Seeing the window of opportunities rapidly diminishing, the academic then travelled on to Qatar, where he had been invited for a conference on Middle Eastern affairs in early May. However, a group of perhaps 5 Norwegians plus some Americans, probably FBI, followed him there as well. Despite having been given an official invitation from the ruling family he was subjected to harassment by the emiri guard at the event he was attending and exposed to severe noise harassment at night during his hotel stay. Americans and hotel staff carried out most of the harassment; it was clear that the GCC countries did not have the same experience in using these police methods as European and North American countries have.

The stalking victim then travelled on to Jordan in order to make an approach to the CIA via the US embassy, but this did not work out. He suspected foul play as the supposed CIA station officer he met seemed to be acting out of character during their interview. Having now seen basic rule of law principles violated on three continents, the academic nonetheless decided to make a last attempt in the EU. But once more, Norwegian police followed after him – to Italy, France and the Netherlands. Increasingly, in some countries it now seemed police were cooperating with the general population in the stalking operation, apparently by circulating images of him so that he could be identified and subjected to the full range of harassment at their hands as in shopping centres and other public spaces.

The Dutch factor: From human rights violations to crimes against humanity

By June 2011, the academic decided he had travelled enough, not least since his stomach condition had worsened to a point where he needed medical treatment. Also, the behaviour of the Norwegian police seemed to send a signal that they would pursue him to any corner of the world, meaning there was little use in trying more countries anyway. He settled down in the Netherlands, thinking it would be easier to build a case against the police if he stayed in one place and made efforts to identify by name the principal offenders among the police and their collaborators in the local community. He also hoped that the international participation in the operation would vanish once the airmiles factor disappeared.

Walkway in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, where Dutch police harassed the historian on a daily basis from July 2011 to January 2012 Whereas the Norwegians finally seemed to reduce their direct engagement in the operation in the autumn of 2011, the local police in the Netherlands kept harassing him. In some ways the harassment campaign took on an even more depraved form when it became localised in the Netherlands. Dutch police basically recruited the general population in the medium-sized coastal town of Noordwijk and, later, the small town of Maasdam (both in the Zuid Holland province) to stalk the man around the clock for around a half-year in each place. In the case of Maasdam, the penetration rate with respect to population participation was probably as high as above 50 per cent. Health workers and doctors – categories that are exempt from this kind of thing in many authoritarian states that openly practice torture – were enlisted to take part in the harassment in some of these areas. In Noordwijk, the intimidation campaign was focused on the prestigious Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin, where the victim stayed as a long-term guest from July 2011 until January 2012.

Walkway in Maasdam, the Netherlands, where Dutch police harassed the historian on a daily basis from January to July 2012 \ The way children and handicapped people have also been enrolled to take part in this stalking case can be described as a crime against humanity – because these participants in the operation are really victims as well. It involves the systematic use of state power to socialise hundreds of Dutch children and other legal minors into believing extra-judicial punishment and bullying is OK. To deliberately use handicapped and even psychologically handicapped people to communicate stigma and marginality will in turn reflect negatively on these already weak groups and serve to reiterate stereotypes. In many ways, alongside the stalking victim, the legal minors encouraged or even forced to participate in stalking operations by the police or their parents in this case are the collateral damage and perhaps the most vulnerable of the victims. These children will grow up with a mind set that is part medieval and part 1984 in the Orwellian sense.

By June 2012, the stalking campaign had assumed a character that took it close to physical torture, with extremely heavy sleep deprivation (in repeated cases no sleep at all over a 60 hours period). This kind of escalation is not untypical of the life cycle of a police stalking operation. The police has a naïve theory that the community-based stalking through the simulation of everyday activities can create sufficient pressure on the stalking victim to make him or her leave. They apparently consider this method legal, conveniently ignoring of course the fact that stalking is a crime in many countries. As the stalking victim resists and attempts to involve locals in “community policing” fail, the operation may grow

increasingly violent and become more similar to a traditional torture situation. Often, when the police finally succeeds in pushing the stalking victim out, they have long ago abandoned their community policing ideals and are secretly using torture-like methods to cause extreme sleep deprivation, forcing the stalking victim to leave due to physical and not psychological pressures.

When police stalking detracts from honest police work Even though the Norwegian involvement in this remarkable stalking operation is now less intensive than it was initially, the operation was Norwegian by design and it was Norwegian police who initiated and led the global operation. It is also the Norwegian government who must ultimately assume responsibility for instigating human right crimes in more than 9 different countries against a citizen who is not even Norwegian (the stalking victim has the nationality of an EU country even though he was born in Norway).

The only thing they have actually achieved through their use of millions of Norwegian kroner of taxpayer money is to ruin the health and the Middle East research of the academic, much to the detriment of several NATO allies who are still using his Gulf analyses in their own work.

Whether there has been an Europol factor involved is unknown. But in any case, the extensive international cooperation here illustrates the degree to which international police diplomacy – basically cops who love to stay in fancy hotels in the name of “international police cooperation” instead of patrolling on the beat – can undermine the more fundamental interests of sovereign states as reflected in their foreign policy. It is also a disturbing testament to judicial standards in supposed rule-of-law democracies that the stalking victim in this case travelled between 9 different countries and yet the illegal operation transitioned almost seamlessly from country to country (with the exception of the Middle Eastern ones, where clearly these technologies were unknown and where more rudimentary substitutes were used instead). It is immaterial whether the case is perhaps somewhat unique in geographical extension and duration of time. The capability to do the operation was omnipresent, and the fact that 9 supposedly sovereign countries were prepared to promptly replicate an extra-judicial operation originating with the Oslo police shows the remarkable speed with which injustice can travel in the twenty-first century. It similarly highlights the potential side effects of ever more uncritical expansion of “international police cooperation”. In this case, altogether 9 countries decided to ignore their own constitutions and the European convention of human rights when faced with a request from a Norwegian police official to stalk the fashion historian.

In modern Western judicial philosophy, it is commonly taken for granted that a suspect in a crime has the right to 1) Receive information about what law s/he has violated; 2) Explain

him- or herself; 3) Have the case settled by an independent court; 4) If found guilty of anything, be punished humanely through prison, labour or fines. These are basic privileges that we routinely bestow even upon people suspected of the most horrible crimes, including terrorism, murder and child abuse. But in this controversial photography case, all these four very fundamental boxes of justice have been left unchecked. Instead, acting as jury, judge and executioner at the same time, Norwegian police has done to this man the logical opposite of what he had done to the people he photographed. He never stalked anyone or even photographed anyone on more than a single occasion. Thus, if someone felt they were being photographed and found it bothersome, it lasted for a few seconds of their life only. That is the sort of risk exposure that is generally seen as acceptable in a modern liberal society. Conversely, the Norwegian police has ruined the life of the man by stalking him 24/7 for more than 500 days, with medically documented permanent physical injuries to his intestinal tract stemming from severe dehydration episodes with subsequent digestion problems.

Finally, it is also part of this story that the excessive use of undercover agents from the organised crime unit of the Oslo police between February and June 2011 took away resources precisely in the key period leading up to the 22 July 2011 terror attacks in Norway – when Norwegian police had tipoffs relating to Anders Behring Breivik, but failed to do anything about them. It is the big irony of this case that Norwegian police exploited anti-terror technology to target an academic working for the rule of law and against terror in the Middle East, while at the same time taking the eyes off the ball and ignoring signs about a terror plot that was underway. In late April 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik made the final preparations for his 22 July attack which killed 77 people in Oslo and on Utøya, dozens of Norwegian undercover police officers were busy harassing a controversial photographer in Seattle, some 7,300 kilometres away from Oslo – presumably “on the beat for a safer capital”, as their slogan says.

In sum, this case shows how police stalking not only violates the principles of rule of law, it also sometimes affects police units and their operations in ways that deflect attention from the real tasks before the police. Both dimensions emphasise how crime committed in the name of the rechtsstaat may well be the greatest threat to that state itself.

July 15, 2012

If something reminiscent of police stalking goes on where you live, consider the following: -In a democratic rule of law society, apart from imposing limited fines, the police has no right to punish anyone without reference to the judiciary.

-The unlawfulness of police-directed punishments of citizens is what makes the West different from full blown police states like North Korea. When the police uses stalking as punishment, the differences between democratic and non-democratic countries get blurred.

-In a police stalking situation, the only criminals are the police themselves and any citizens they may succeed in luring into participating with them. If the police could have gone after the stalking victim legally, they would have done so.

-In most countries, any attempt by police officers to instigate intimidation of a person will be punishable by law, either as harassment, stalking or psychological torture.

-Participation of citizens in (police) stalking is punishable by law in most Western countries. Countries that have specific legislation to stalking or harassment that applies equally to police stalking include the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. In most of these countries, assisting the police with any kind of intimidation directed at a fellow citizen is punishable with jail if it happens more than once, typically with maximum sentences of 2-3 years imprisonment. It is immaterial whether the act in itself is perfectly innocuous as long as it is directed against someone else and is part of a wider pattern.

-Always remember that the main part of the police stalking operation takes place away from the public gaze, and often consists of extreme sleep deprivation and other forms of physical torture. The part played by the general public is just for show; the operation goes on 24/7 and the truly dirty work is done behind the scenes.

-Remember also that, sadly, states with the most pristine uniformed constabularies sometimes have the most savage and barbaric undercover police.

-If someone you believe is a victim of a police stalking operation dies unexpectedly, demand an autopsy. European undercover police officers participating in stalking operations are using electroshocks and other unconventional methods. Such renegade police officers are currently operating with impunity outside their own jurisdictions, including in a number of Asian countries.

-If you become aware of a police stalking situation, try to contact the victim. Given the extreme asymmetry of power in police stalking cases, victims depend upon witnesses to stop the illegal harassment.

-The crime with the greatest potential to undermine a liberal society is that which is carried out in the name of law enforcement. To defend the rule of law and liberal democracy, reject police stalking.

July 15, 2012

13. august offentliggjøres rapporten til 22. juli-kommisjonen. Dessverre er det mye som tyder på at kommisjonen ikke vil gå i dybden på de alvorlige prioriteringsproblemene i Oslo-politiet i månedene forut for terrorangrepene den 22. juli 2011. Blant annet vil den neppe komme inn på den skandaløse ressurs- og mannskapsbruken til Oslo-politiet i løpet av våren 2011. I denne perioden fulgte ikke Oslo-politiets elitespanere opp tips knyttet til Anders Behring Breivik, men brukte i stedet store ressurser på å plage og mishandle en kronisk syk fotograf og akademiker.

En dødfødt og ulovlig politioperasjon For å bedre forstå Oslo-politiets handlingsrom og prioriteringer kan det være nyttig å ta en titt på hva dets egen ledelse selv sa om disse tingene i januar 2011. I det som skulle vise seg å bli et profetisk varsel sa Eirik Jensen fra avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet til Aftenposten 10. januar at politiets spaning på potensielle terrormiljøer ville bli innskrenket til noen få kriminelle arenaer i 2011 på grunn av interne budsjettkutt. I samme artikkel bekreftet sjefen for organisert kriminalitet at PST hyppig benyttet seg av spaningskapasiteten til Oslo-politiet i denne typen saker. I et tidligere intervju hadde en politikilde forklart at man hadde kapasitet til å døgnforfølge maksimalt 4 personer samtidig (Aftenposten 2. januar 2011).

Hva som skjedde med den interne budsjetteringen i Oslo-politiet i månedene etter denne avisartikkelen er uvisst. Derimot er det kjent at prioriteringene til Oslo-politiet og avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet i tiden etter denne dramatiske advarselen og månedene frem til 22. juli flyttet seg vekk fra terrorisme og over til noe ganske annet. I stedet for å følge opp tips om Anders Behring Breivik valgte man å konsentrere ressursbruk og store mannskaper på å forfølge og trakassere en akademiker/fotograf på ikke mindre enn tre ulike kontinenter.

Målet for operasjonen var en Midtøsten-historiker som hadde drevet med gatefotografering i Oslo på si for et fremtidig sosiologisk orientert prosjekt om gatemote.

På tross av at slik fotografering er 100% lovlig i følge norsk lov og rettspraksis (inkludert en dom som spesifikt sier at man har rett til å ta bilder med mobiltelefon og flere andre dommer som vektlegger nakenhet som grensen der fotografering kan bli straffbart) valgte Oslo-politiet å definere historikerens fotografering som et særdeles alvorlig problem.

Men i stedet for å prøve å kontakte ham for en samtale for å klare opp i eventuelle misforståelser gikk politiet i februar 2011 rett fra sine mistanker til en massiv, organisert mobbeaksjon – såkalt politistalking – for å få historikeren vekk fra Oslo.Døgnet rundt ble han fotfulgt med mannskaper og bilpatruljer som også klarte å infliltrere arbeidsplassen hans på dagtid og som laget bråk ved leiligheten hans på Bislett hele natten gjennom slik at han opparbeidet ekstrem søvnmangel.

Ved hjelp av døgnforfølging og ulike former for mobbing i mer enn en måned klarte Oslo-politiet til slutt å presse historikeren til å forlate Norge i slutten av mars 2011.

Denne typen utenomrettslig avstraffelse mot uønskede grupper og individer er ganske vanlig i flere europeiske og nordamerikanske land, og den forekommer også i Norge. Det som var uvanlig i denne saken var at politiet ikke gav seg med å jage historikeren fra landet. I stedet fulgte de etter ham utenlands med store mannskaper, inkludert flere såkalte «elitespanere» fra Oslo-politiets avdeling for organisert kriminalitet. I en skandale til mange millioner kroner begikk Oslo-politiet menneskerettighetsforbrytelser i tilsammen 9 ulike land i perioden mars 2011-juli 2012. Den straffeekspedisjonen Oslo-politiet la ut på står i grell kontrast til en av de få dommene for mobilfotografering i Norge som finnes – en relativt beskjeden straff i form av bot på 25 000 kroner for en lege i Sunndal som fotograferte mer enn 2 000 bilder av pasienters underliv uten at de kjente til det og som delvis identifiserte bildene på navn. Med andre ord har politiet i denne saken ettertrykkelig

satt lovverket og gjeldende rett til side.

Menneskerettighetsforbrytelser på hjemmebane og i utlandet 22. mars 2011 forlot historikeren Norge. Han fløy fra Flesland til Schiphol i Nederland.

På flyet fikk han inntrykk av at sivile spanere fulgte etter ham så med en gang han hadde landet i Nederland kjøpte han en ny billett til London. I det han går ombord på British Airways sin flight BA439 står en velkledd norsk politimann i sivil og venter på ham. Han har en høyere stilling i Oslo-politiet, er i slutten av 50-årene, har mørkt grått hår og er litt under gjennomsnittet høy. Senere på dagen, etter ankomst London, kommer det flere norske politifolk til Hotel Renaissance i Chancery Court hvor historikeren har bestilt rom.

Flere av spanerne er de samme som har plaget ham dag ut og dag inn i Oslo i mer enn en måned. Og de fortsetter med den samme behandlingen: Biler plassert rett utenfor soverommet med motorer som går på tomgang hele natten, og fotfølging gjennom Londons gater i samarbeid med London-politiet på dagtid.

Noen få dager senere har historikeren fått nok og reiser videre til USA i håp om at det skal mer til for å få amerikansk politi til å delta i den ulovlige aksjonen. Før avgang setter han seg i Sky Team sin lounge på Heathrow. Etter hvert kommer det i alt tre norske politifolk og setter seg i ring rundt ham. Den første er den samme typen i 50-årene som fulgte etter ham fra Schiphol til Heathrow noen dager tidligere. To andre politifolk med ledende stillinger i Oslo-politiet kommer også og setter seg. Den ene er en litt yngre fyr, en ganske kjekk mørk type med litt tynt hår. Den andre er en kvinne i 30-årene med utpreget pent, typisk nordisk utseende, halvlangt blondt hår. Hun ser ikke ut som en typisk politispaner.

Når Continental sin flight CO111 lander på Newark i USA 8 timer senere kommer det ytterligere en gruppe på 10-15 norske politifolk som slutter seg til sine kolleger i det de går gjennom passkontrollen. De har antagelig kommet direkte fra Oslo med Continental eller fra København med SAS. De vifter med norske pass og er til dels lett gjenkjennelige fra fotfølgingsaksjonen i Oslo. Noen ser ut til å være rutinerte spanere mens andre er svært unge – en av jentene er neppe mer enn såvidt 20.

De neste 50 døgnene fortsetter Oslo-politiet sin uvanlige utenlandsoperasjon mens taksameteret går i hundre. Norske skattebetaleres penger svies av i høyt tempo på luksuriøse femstjerners hoteller, flybilletter på forretningsklasse og svindyre leiebiler (minst en av betjentene synes å ha utviklet en spesiell forkjærlighet for blankpussede svarte SUVer). Ferden går på kryss og tvers i USA og Canada. De ledende politibetjentene er nesten hele tiden de samme. For det første er det politibetjenten i slutten av 50-årene, som hadde fulgt etter historikeren fra Schiphol til Heathrow den 22. mars og som fortsatte å sende inn saftige reiseregninger både i april og mai. 1. april var han i Washington, DC, 16. april var han i Ottawa i Canada og 19. april var han på Marriott-hotellet i Woodley Park i Washington igjen. To andre gjengangere utmerker seg også. Den ene er en mann i 50-årene med skjegg og grått hår i bakoversleik. Han er overbetjent i norsk politi og et av spesialfeltene hans er å stå med bilen med motoren på tomgang utenfor vinduet til fotfølgingsobjekter i timesvis, gjerne med heftig tuting med jevne mellomrom. Han var på luksushotellet Ritz Carlton i Washington den 31. mars, på Intercontinental i Montreal i Canada den 12. april, og igjen i Washington den 17. april. Den andre gjengangeren er en kar på nærmere 2 meter som ikke har noe hår på hodet. Typisk dørvakttype som ser ut som en ekte viking bortsett fra at han har brune øyne. 26. april sitter han på 9. rad på flight UA917 fra Washington DC til Seattle, rett bak historikeren. Han er mer enn 7 000 kilometer hjemmefra, men synes å ha klokketro på Oslo-politiets motto: «På jobb for en tryggere hovedstad».

I mai 2011 har Oslo-politiet brukt over en million kroner på operasjonen mot den kontroversielle fotografen uten å ha oppnådd noe annet enn å forstyrre ham i hans Midøsten-arbeid i en periode da han blant annet gav inviterte foredrag for CIA og State Department. Men politiet gir seg ikke med det. Historikeren tenker at galskapen i det minste vil stoppe i Midtøsten, og drar til Qatar den 7. mai 2011. Lett gjenkjennelige norske politibetjenter – minst to av de tre hovedmennene – følger etter ham også der. De sørger endatil for å få adgangspass til den akademiske konferansen om politisk endring i Midøsten der historikeren deltar. Deretter følger de ham til Jordan også.

I slutten av mai 2011, da Anders Behring Breivik er i gang med sine siste forberedelser til de dødelige angrepene han planlegger, fortsetter operasjonen mot den kontroversielle akademikeren å binde opp store ressurser og mannskaper for Oslo-politiets fremste spaningsgruppe.

Den siste fasen av storstilt norsk engasjement i denne absurde operasjonen fant sted i juni og juli 2011. Oslo-politiet fulgte historikeren fra Jordan til Italia og Frankrike. 3. juni sitter historikeren på en gatekafe på Champs Elyssees i Paris og diskuterer Midtøsten med representanter fra Verdensbanken. Ved nabobordet sitter en av gjengangerne fra spaningsgruppen i Oslo-politiet samt en av de kvinnelige spanerne – en dame i 40-årene med halvlangt lyst hår og en liten tatovering. Hun hadde 4 måneder tidligere fulgt ham inn på apoteket i Oslo.

På grunn av helseproblemer drar historikeren til slutt til Nederland for å bo der en lengre periode. Overalt følges han av norske spanere. Da bombene smeller i Oslo den 22. juli er han på Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin i kystbyen Noordwijk. Selv på det tidspunktet, midt i den norske fellesferien, deltar norsk politi med uforminsket styrke i den uvanlige operasjonen.

Et paralysert politi med manglende prioriteringsevne og sviktende dømmekraft Dersom man setter denne saken ved siden av 22. juli-tragedien så blir det enklere å forstå hvorfor norsk politi aldri klarte å avverge angrepene og hadde store problemer med å få kontroll over situasjonen i tiden etterpå. På den ene side hadde man tilsynelatende ubegrensede midler å bruke på en fullstendig ulovlig operasjon med uklare mål om å plage en kontroversiell fotograf. På den andre siden forelå det konkrete tips i Breivik-saken, inkludert tips fra Tollvesenet og informasjon relatert til våpenhandel og kjøp av kunstgjødsel, som aldri ble fulgt opp av PST og dens viktigste samarbeidspartnere i Oslo-politiet. Det er forsåvidt likegyldig om det faktisk fantes en konkret anledning der disse to høyst ulike sakene ble konkret vurdert mot hverandre eller ei. Det viktige poenget her er at den vanvittige penge- og ressursbruken på reising til eksotiske destinasjoner må ha påvirket spaningskapasiteten til Oslo-politiet – og dermed politiets og PSTs handlingsrom, prioriteringsevne og dømmekraft på et mer generelt plan. Det er simpelthen for mange høytstående polititjenestemenn ved Oslo-politiets avdeling for organisert kriminalitet som har brukt for mye tid utenlands på denne saken i for lang tid. Det er utenkelig at dette ikke vil ha hatt en effekt på norsk politis generelle beredskap i de avgjørende månedene før 22. juli. Uansett hva som enn skjedde med de konkrete tipsene i Breivik-saken er det riktig å si at Oslo-politiet som kollektiv institusjon tok øynene grundig fra ballen i første halvår av 2011.

En mer rasjonell politiorganisasjon ville i hvert fall stoppet operasjonen i det historikeren forlot landet den 22. mars 2011. For en billig penge kunne man fortsatt å spane på ham på diskret vis i utlandet dersom man mistenkte at mer enn en måneds mishandling i Oslo ikke hadde fratatt ham lysten til å drive gatefotografering. I stedet valgte man altså å bruke millioner av norske skattebetaleres kroner på å forfølge ham med uklare juridiske motiver i utlandet. Husk at dette er det samme politiet som bare hadde råd til ett eneste helikopter!

Oslo-politiets underenhet i avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet, «spesielle operasjoner» (SO), har i særdeleshet levd opp til sitt navn i denne aksjonen.

Noe av det som fremdeles er ukjent i denne saken er hvor langt opp i Oslo-politiet og norsk politibråkrati for øvrig den skandaløse sløsingen med statlige midler var godkjent.

Advokater som er blitt intervjuet i forbindelse med saken sier at i prinsippet er det slik at en aksjon av denne typen må ha godkjennelse fra sjefen for avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet, politimesteren i Oslo og sannsynligvis politidirektøren. Hvor vidt dette faktisk ble gjort er ukjent. Sjefen for organisert kriminalitet, Einar Aas , har tidligere uttalt at underenhetene hans i det store og det hele er «selvdrevne». Om den i dag avtrappende politimesteren i Oslo, Anstein Gjengedal, var informert i 2011 er også ukjent.

Politidirektøren på det tidspunktet operasjonen begynte var Ingelin Killengreen, som hadde sin siste arbeidsdag i politiet den 31. mars 2011, godt og vel en uke etter at operasjonen var blitt internasjonalisert. Hun ble etterfulgt av Vidar Refvik som stedfortreder fram til 20. juni 2011, da Øystein Mæland overtok. Mæland er av utdanning psykiater og dersom han skulle hatt kjennskap til den ekstreme psykiske mishandlingen i denne saken ville det jo i seg selv være en skandale. Endelig er det uklart om det har vært deltakelse fra den internasjonale desken i prestisjetunge Kripos, som vanligvis er involvert når norsk politi ber om internasjonal assistanse.

Det knytter seg også spørsmål til måten en del ledende skikkelser i norsk samfunnsliv utenfor politiet støttet denne ulovlige aksjonen. Tragisk nok deltok enkelte medlemmer av Arbeiderpartiet – hovedofferet for terrorangrepene den 22. juli – som samarbeidspartnere for politiet i mobbeaksjonen mot historikeren da den ble innledet vinteren 2011. Også et mindre antall advokater, journalister og akademikere deltok på ulike tidspunkt i operasjonen. Mer generelt kan det ikke stikkes under en stol at det norske politiske etablissementet som helhet har vært forbløffende ukritiske i sin støtte til tvilsomme politimetoder generelt og fotfølging spesielt. Tidligere justisminister Knut Storberget har offentlig stått side om side med en av de ledende kreftene bak utviklingen av politiets fotfølgingsmetoder, mens Arbeiderpartiets Jan Bøhler har gjentatte ganger målbåret ønskene til Harald Bøhler og andre medlemmer av Oslo-politiets avdeling for organisert kriminalitet i diskusjoner i Stortingets justiskomite. Til og med Jan Egeland, NUPIs tidligere direktør og nåværende leder i Europa-avdelingen til prestisjetunge Human Rights Watch, gikk friskt ut med å erklære norsk politi «førsteklasses» i et intervju like før han sluttet på NUPI i 2011 (Norsk Politi nr. 2, juni 2011).

Saken reiser videre spørsmål om grunnleggende aspekter av Norges nasjonale sikkerhetsstruktur. Fremfor alt gjelder dette den tilsynelatende organiske avhengigheten mellom prestisjeorganisasjoner som PST og Kripos og hva en del politifolk selv synes å beskrive som halvkriminelle miljøer i Oslo-politiets avdeling for organisert kriminalitet («møkkete, stripete og quislinger», Aftenposten 15. januar 2012). Endel av disse såkelte spanerne er ikke noe annet enn statsautoriserte bøller og rånere som har like dårlig forståelse av menneskerettighetsproblematikk og juss som en gjennomsnittlig shabiha i det syriske regimets tjeneste. Besatt av ny teknologi håndhever disse profesjonelle menneskerettighetsforbryterne ikke norsk lov men derimot sine egne juridiske fantasier. Og de får altså overtidsbetaling og fete nattillegg fra den norske stat for å plage uskyldige mennesker utenlands! Det triste er jo at uniformert norsk politi stort sett fremstår som både ærlige og ikke-voldelige i sammenligning med andre land i verden, mens spaningsenhetene altså huser primitive barbarer som er i en klasse for seg hva angår manglende respekt for menneskeliv. Og det er en spesielt trist ironi at det var avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet som fikk en hovedrolle i etterforskningen av Anders Behring Breivik. Alle skjønner jo at Breivik er en trussel mot det norske demokratiet, men enkelte miljøer i org. krim.-enheten er på mange måter i seg selv en enda større trussel siden de driver kriminalitet i rettsstatens navn – den mest undergravende aktivitet som tenkes kan.

Man skulle tro at Oslo-politiet hadde lært noe i løpet av denne operasjonen, men den gang ei. Etter at nederlandsk politi i juli 2012 trappet opp mishandlingen av historikeren til et punkt der det kunne beskrives som regulær tortur, dro han til Asia. Norge og andre europeiske staters politifolk var fremdeles med, blant annet på Taiwan som ikke en gang har diplomatiske relasjoner med Norge og Nederland.

Politiarbeid handler først og fremst om å gjøre prioriteringer. Det finnes en nær uendelig mengde av problemer i samfunnet som politiet kan velge å gripe inn i eller overse. Det er helt grunnleggende at politiet i vestlige liberale land evner å differensiere mellom trusler som kan føre til at menneskeliv går tapt og problemer som kan forårsake mild irritasjon og neppe noe mer.

Det blir nesten som grunnkurseksamen i politiarbeid. Du har begrensede ressurser. Du har to problemer. Det ene person A som planlegger å drepe så mange personer som mulig i en

terroraksjon, gjerne toppolitikere hvis sjansen byr seg. Det andre er person B som av og til tar bilder av folk på gaten i fullt dagslys når han går til og fra jobb uten at politiet helt begriper hvorfor.

Norsk politi valgte å gå etter person B med store ressurser mens de totalt ignorerte person A. Det står til stryk.

July 15, 2012

Ett eksempel på hvordan norsk politi bruker fotfølging eller stalking fortjener ekstra oppmerksomhet på grunn av sakens spesielle karakter, selv om metodene i denne aksjonen i seg selv er ganske vanlige. Saken gjelder en akademiker som har vært døgnforfulgt av norsk politi i Norge og utlandet siden februar 2011 uten noen form for juridisk begrunnelse. Denne saken viser hvordan utradisjonelle metoder som politistalking kan bryte så mange fundamentale rettsprinsipper at selve rettsstatsidealet kommer under press. Det er også en sak som viser hvordan uvettig og overivrig bruk av fotfølging kan lede politiet så langt fra dets grunnleggende arbeidsoppgaver at reell kriminalitet, inkludert terrorisme, får anledning til å blomstre. I denne saken dikter norsk politi opp sine egne lover for deretter å håndheve disse på ulik måte overfor ulike grupper av borgere. Saken fremstår dessuten som ekstrem hva angår intensitet og varighet: 24 timer i døgnet i mer enn ett og et halvt år, med utstrakt bruk av nattesøvnsforstyrrelser mot en person med kjent inflammatorisk tarmsykdom.

Offeret i denne saken er en akademiker som bodde i Oslo frem til 2011. Han var historiker og hadde vesentlig publisert bøker og artikler om Midtøsten, med flere arbeider som hadde vunnet bred internasjonal anerkjennelse. På grunn av helseproblemer kunne han ikke reise så mye til Midtøsten som han ønsket. For å gradvis kunne arbeide som mer generelt orientert historiker hadde han begynt å utvikle et sekundært forskningsprosjekt med en mer sosiologisk orientering innenfor feltet motehistorie. Fokus i prosjektet var på drakampen mellom designermote og konsumentgrupper slik den kommer til uttrykk i gatemote, med særlig fokus på hvordan gatemote ofte overlever vesentlig lenger enn designermote gjennom populære merkeklær og basisplagg som i visse land og regioner får en dominerende posisjon med levetid på flere år. Han samlet materiale for prosjektet gjennom gatefotografering med mobiltelefon, vesentlig på vei til og fra jobb i Oslo. Utvalgskriteriet

for inklusjon i prosjektet var at personer passet ulike prototyper av gatemote. Ingen forsøk ble gjort på å finne ut identiteten til de som ble fotografert; ei heller ble noen fotografert mer enn ved ett tilfelle. Gjennom mer enn 15 års karriere hadde historikeren konsekvent gjort bruk av fotografier i sine publiserte arbeider, og hadde blant annet tidligere kjøpt opp en samling på flere tusen fotografier som dokumenterte folkeliv i en havneby i Midøsten på 1920-tallet.

Når politiet dikter opp loven: Mobilfotografering og rettighetsspørsmål For å forstå hvor langt ute på jordet Oslo-politiet er i denne saken er det nødvendig å først ta en kikk på hvordan norske lover og gjeldende rett forholder seg til fotografering.

Det juridiske rammeverket for fotografering i Norge, herunder mobilfotografering, er i det store og det hele tilsvarende andre vestlige land: Fotografering ansees som lovlig på steder der folk har alminnelig adgang, med mindre det er eksplisitt forbudt (for eksempel nær militære omåder). Straffeloven nevner fotografi kun ved ett eneste tilfelle, og det gjelder kommersiell barnepornografi. I tillegg har mange byer politivedtekter som gjerne prøver å regulere forhold som ikke er dekket av Straffeloven. Men igjen er det slik at politivedtektene for Oslo – som går i betydelig detalj på områder som skateboarding så vel som høylydt musikkoppførelse – ikke har noe å si om fotografering. Da norske politikere vurderte å forby visse former for fotografering på 1970-tallet (særlig fotografering som ble oppfattet som å krenke privatlivets fred i boliger og andre private områder) skal man ha endt opp med å forkaste hele lovforslaget.

I tråd med dette har ikke Politiloven, som blant annet regulerer avlytting og fjernstyrt skjult videoopptak, noe å si om hvordan politiet kan bruke fotografering. Dette er ganske enkelt fordi politiet kan fotografere det de vil akkurat som andre borgere kan det. Denne tolkningen ble spesifikt bekreftet av en gruppe eksperter som utarbeidet en NOU på politimetoder i 2004 (NOU 6/2004). Det har også vært en rekke eksempler på at i hvert fall deler av norsk politi forstår og respekterer disse rammene, selv i saker som i utgangspunktet kunne virke som kontroversielle. For eksempel kommenterte politiadvokat Tor Henning Knudsen i 2003 at gatebilder av jenterumper fra Oslo som ble publisert på en halvpornografisk nettside var lovlige både hva angikk selve fotograferingen så vel som publiseringen (det siste fordi ansikter ikke ble vist, Dagbladet 11. juni 2003). På samme måte hevdet Trondheims-politiet i 2010 at en mann som fotograferte nakne barn i en park med telelinse var på lovlig grunn hva angikk selve fotograferingen, men at det kunne knytte seg juridiske problemer til en eventuell publisering (Adresseavisen, 31. juli 2010).

Det finnes også en relativt fersk dom fra Oslo tingrett fra 2009 som spesifikt bekrefter nordmenns rett til å ta bilder med mobiltelefon i offentlig tilgjengelige områder (i dette tilfellet etter at Oslo-politiet hadde prøvd å bøtelegge en advokat som tok bilde av dem,

TV2 6. februar 2009).

Helt i takt med denne forståelsen av gjeldende rett er det svært sjelden noen blir domfelt i Norge for fotografering, det være seg med mobilkameraer eller tradisjonelle kameraer.

Nesten alle sakene som har ført til domfellelse har involvert en eller annen form for grov privatlivskrenkelse, enten ved at personer er blitt fotografert nakne og/eller ved at bilder av lettkledde personer er blitt seksualisert gjennom publisering på eksplisitt pornografiske nettsteder. Eksempelvis ble en mann i Bergens-området dømt til en kort fengselsstraff i 2006 for å ha tatt en mengde bilder i flere kjøpesentre der et tosifret antall av bildene dreide seg om såkalt upskirt-fotografering i rulletrapp der kvinner var blitt fotografert under skjørtene. En halvt avkledd mindreårig jente var også blitt fotografert i et prøverom.

I en annen sak fra Hamar i 2009 dreide det seg om toppløs fotografering fra en strand med påfølgende publisering av bildene på et pornografisk nettsted. Endelig finnes det en helt ekstraordinær sak fra Sunndal som dreide seg om en gynekologisk legevikar som brukte mobiltelefon til å fotografere et stort antall kvinner under gynekologiske undersøkelser uten å informere dem om dette. Denne saken endte med en bot på 25 000 kroner i 2011.

Det er ikke tvil om at saken gjaldt helt ekstreme overtredelser på en rekke måter: Det totalt asymmetriske maktforholdet mellom legen og pasienten såvel fysisk (den påkledde legen versus nakne kvinner i gynekologstol) som psykisk (legers yrkesautorietet versus kvinner som søkte legehjelp), den invasive fotograferingen (foto og video som fokuserte på kvinnenes underliv og kjønnsorgan), fraværet av anonymitet (legen hadde gitt flere av bildefilene navn etter pasientene), samt det svært høye antallet av denne typen bilder (angivelig mer enn 2000). Nøytrale observatører vil sikkert spørre seg om straffen (bot på 25 000 kroner) var proporsjonal med forbrytelsens alvorlighet. Ikke desto mindre er det viktig å merke seg at dette var hva norsk påtalemakt og politi kom opp med etter at statsadvokaten først hadde henlagt saken (visstnok på grunn av fraværet av en eksplisitt pornografisk dimensjon), og riksadvokaten hadde spesifikt bedt om at den ble gjenopptatt.

Sagt med andre ord, dersom norsk rettvesen virkelig ønsket å sende et sterkt signal om temaet mobilfotografering så hadde man en gyllen anledning i tiden denne ekstreme saken pågikk fra 2007 til 2011. Men man valgte altså selv i denne spesielle saken å legge til grunn en relativ liberal tilnærming til spørsmålet om hva som er lovlig fotografering og hva som er alvorlige overtramp. Uansett hva politiet måtte mene om fotografering så er det er disse signalene fra rettsvesenet norsk offentlighet og innbyggere i Norge har hatt å forholde seg til.

Norsk rettspraksis reflekterer den liberale europeiske jussen omkring fotografering mer generelt. I Danmark er fotografering omtalt i landets straffelov, men kun i forbindelse med militære områder eller områder som ikke er tilgjengelig for allmennheten (artikkel 264a). I Sverige har høyesterett gått så langt som å avvise en sak mot en person som hadde tatt opp skjult video av naboer inne i deres egne leiligheter, til dels i avkledd tilstand og endog mens noen av dem hadde sex. Argumentet var at all den tid de fant ut om dette i ettertid

kunne ikke selve filmingen beskrives som krenkende siden de ikke visste noe da den fant sted (Sydsvenskan, 15. november 2006). Dette synes jo å være på grensen av europeisk rettighetstenkning der den europeiske menneskerettighetsdomstolen står ganske fast på at hjemmets fire vegger utgjør en ukrenkelig sone, men det viser igjen hvor liberale europeiske domstoler kan være i forbindelse med fotografering. Helt i takt med dette erklærte svensk politi at utstrakt nakenfotografering av flere tusen svensker på strender i Helsingborg i 2009 var lovlig, også etter at bildene var blitt publisert på internett (Expressen, Helsingborg Dagblad, 19. juli 2009).

I Nederland kan man enkelte steder finne skilt om at fotografering er forbudt, eksempelvis på offentlige toaletter. Kun saker som dreier seg om massiv invasjon av privatsfæren har endt med rettssaker, for eksempel da et TV-team filmet alvorlig syke og døende mennesker inne på et sykehus og publiserte materialet uten å spørre de involverte. Dommer fra den europeiske menneskerettighetsdomstolen ser ut til å bekrefte dette bildet. Eksempelvis ble politiets fotografering av en demonstrerende østerriker i 1988 funnet lovlig (Friedl vs Østerrike) blant annet med henvisning til at privatlivet til den demonstrerende personen ikke var krenket gjennom fotograferingen. Storbritannia (og USA) går kanskje enda lenger ved at man ganske enkelt ser fotografering som en del av ytringsfriheten. I England sier Metropolitan Police eksplisitt at de kun kan stoppe fotografering på offentlig sted dersom det kan sees i sammenheng med en potensiell terrorhandling.

De vestlige land som har forsøkt å regulere visse former for fotografering har stort sett kommet frem til at nakenhet er det som er mulig og hensiktsmessig å lovregulere.

Eksempelvis har enkelte stater i USA forbud mot fotografering i visse områder forbundet med privatlivets fred, slik som omkledningsrom og offentlige toaletter. Noen stater har også spesifikk lovgiving mot fotografering av kjønnsorganer. Denne typen lovgivning har også blitt vedtatt i Australia og New Zealand (også kalt anti-voyeuristisk lovgivning). New Zealand utmerker seg ellers som et land som har hatt en grundig parlamentarisk debatt omkring fotografiske problemstillinger i tiden etter mobilkameraets inntog. Etter en lang diskusjon havnet man også her på at det som måtte forbyes var fotografering av nakenhet/kjønnsorganer. Rettsvesenet i New Zealand hadde i 2005 endog gått så langt som å straffeforfølge en person som hadde tatt bilder som ikke hadde med nakenhet å gjøre (det dreide seg om et stort antall ungdomsskolejenter som var blitt fotografert på vei til skolen). Denne saken hadde endt opp med en fellende dom for uanstendig opptreden der man vektla fraværet av en legitim begrunnelse for fotograferingen, samt det faktum at fotograferingen hadde et element av maskerade i det fotografen gjemte seg med telelinse bak gardinene i en bobil. I ettertid har imidlertid denne saken blitt stående som en enestående kuriositet, både i New Zealand og i internasjonalt komparativ perspektiv. New Zealands rettsvesen avviste selv sak nummer to mot samme person, som dreide seg om fotografering av et stort antall intetanende studenter på et offentlig bibliotek (New Zealand Herald, 17. desember 2005). Man konkluderte med at denne fotograferingen var «uvanlig

men ikke uanstendig». Og da parlamentet endelig vedtok forbudet mot nakenfotografering med mobil i desember 2006 valgte man altså å overse andre former for mobilfotografering.

I det store og det hele kan man bare konkludere at fotografering simpelthen aksepteres av rettsvesenet i europeiske og vestlige stater på en helt annen måte enn i andre deler av verden. I Qatar vil turistbrosjyrer informere om at man må be om tillatelse for å fotografere kvinner. I Sudan må man ha tillatelse fra myndighetene før man kan ta foto av noe som helst. Norge er ikke Sudan.

Det ene området av europeisk og vestlig menneskerettighetstenkning som kanskje kunne være av relevans i fotografisaker har med stalking å gjøre. Men så godt som samtlige stater som har vedtatt lover mot stalking har konkludert med at enkeltepisoder av fotografering ikke utgjør stalking. All lovgivning på feltet stalking krever at det samme enkeltindividet skal ha blitt utsatt for uønsket oppmerksomhet fra en spesiell person ved mer enn ett tilfelle (eksempler er lovgivning i bl.a. Italia, Belgia og England/Wales). Generelt kan man si at selv om det engelske ordet stalking i sin opprinnelige middelalderske form hadde konnotasjoner av det vi på norsk kaller «sniking» og som kan gjenfinnes i folkelige begreper om «snikfotografering» på en rekke språk, så finnes det ikke noen moderne juridisk ekvivalent som kriminaliserer slik adferd med mindre det enten dreier seg om ekstrem invasjon av privatlivet (vanligvis nakenhet) eller repetert plagsom adferd rettet mot samme enkeltperson (stalking i moderne rettsforstand).

Når man går Oslo-politiet etter i sømmene så er det jo faktisk en del som tyder på at Norge i prinsippet går lengre enn mange andre land i å akseptere at folk fotograferer hverandre stadig vekk. Det var i hvert fall konklusjonen etter ambassadesaken i 2010 der det ble avslørt at et privat etterforskningsfirma hadde drevet overvåking av den amerikanske ambassaden i Oslo, inkludert fotografering som i sin tur ble knyttet opp mot personopplysninger. Denne virksomheten, som gikk vesentlige lengre i retning av invasjon av privatsfæren enn det her omtalte prosjektet om motehistorie som ble kriminalisert av politiet, ble aldri funnet verdig til straffeforfølgelse fra politiets side. Dette fordi det i politiets øyne dreide seg om «observasjon» snarere enn systematisk overvåking.

Ambassadegruppens virksomhet var noe som falt innenfor den allmenne handlefriheten ifølge politiet (Aftenposten 10. desember 2010; NRK 19. januar 2011).

Når det er sagt skal det samtidig nevnes at det finnes en rekke eksempler på at norske politiifolk er totalt ignorante hva angår relevant lovgivning og gjeldende rett i forhold til fotografering. Eksempelet fra Oslo tingrett i 2009 om politifolk som feilaktig både arresterte og bøtela en advokat for å ha fotografert dem er allerede nevnt. Andre sporadiske omtaler fra saker i media antyder at politifolk i både Drammen og Lillestrøm tror de har

rett til å nekte folk å fotografere på offentlig sted og endog kan tvinge dem til å slette bilder.

En utenomrettslig straffeaksjon En mulig nøkkel til å forstå politiets ulike reaksjoner i forhold til motehistorieprosjektet og ambassadeovervåkingen har med bakgrunnen til de involverte å gjøre. Flere av de som drev med ambassadeovervåking var tidligere politifolk. Derimot hadde historikeren som arbeidet med et prosjekt om motehistorie ingen slike priviligerte forbindelser. På tross av at hans prosjekt var vesentlig mindre invasivt i forhold til medborgeres privatsfære (ingen navn ble registrert og ingen forsøk på å identifisere personer fant sted) så valgte Oslo-politiet å oppfatte hans aktivitet som et problem. Ikke bare det, de bestemte at problemet skulle løses på utradisjonelt vis, ved at han skulle forfølges og isoleres sosialt, helt uten noen form for juridisk prosess – såkalt politistalking. Politiet gikk i gang med denne avstraffelsen uten på noe tidspunkt å stille vedkommende et eneste spørsmål om hva han holdt på med og hvorfor. Denne fremgangsmåten ble valgt til tross for at Politiloven sier klart fra om at politiet alltid skal prøve de mykeste alternativene først dersom de skal løse et problem.

Det eneste straffbare forholdet i denne saken knytter seg til politiets egen aktivitet.

Politiets ekstreme reaksjon skulle kunne straffeforfølges under Straffelovens paragraf 117a om psykologisk tortur, og spesifikt som forsøk fra offentlig tjenestemann på å straffe, true eller presse noen. Den avstraffende operasjonen begynte i 2011 etter at politiet hadde spanet på historikeren i lang tid. Sannsynligvis var en god del av bildene hans tatt av «lokkeduer» som politiet hadde sendt ut nettopp for å se om de ble fotografert. Den 12. februar 2011 ble historikeren så stoppet av politiet på åpen gate på høylys dag på Bislett og avkrevd legitimasjon i forbindelse med en angivelig knivepisode på trikken. Det viste seg i ettertid at dette opptrinnet var regissert av politiet, men dette skjønte ikke historikeren til å begynne med. De neste dagene merket han imidlertid et voldsomt oppbud av politibiler hvor han enn beveget seg. Han mente bestemt at fotograferingen han drev med var hundre prosent lovlig men valgte likevel å stoppe for sikkerhets skyld siden det var det eneste han holdt på med som var uvanlig på noen som helst måte.

Men da historikeren stoppet å ta bilder begynte politiet å forfølge ham for alvor. Nå gikk de over til å bruke sivile politibiler også, en gruppe på de samme 10-20 bilene, lett identifiserbare fra nummerskiltene og med gjenkjennelige sjåfører, som begynte å følge etter ham med aggressiv kjøring hvor han enn gikk i Oslo. Om kvelden drev de samme 10-20 bilene og kjørte i ring rundt leiligheten hans i Lille Bislett, like ved bakken i Bislettgata som egner seg gansk godt for bråkete råkjøring. De tutet hele tiden og når han gikk for å legge seg stilte en av bilene seg rett nedenfor vinduet til soverommet og holdt

motoren i gang i timesvis slik at han fikk nesten ikke sove i det hele tatt (slik adferd er i seg selv straffbar under politivedtektene for Oslo, som forbyr støyende aktivitet på eller nært offentlig sted mellom kl. 23 og 6). På arbeidsstedet hans skjedde det samme: Selv om kontoret hans lå noen etasjer opp så stilte en av de sivile politibilene seg utenfor og kjørte frem og tilbake og tutet i det uendelige. Noen av spanerne som fulgte ham til fots på dagtid begynte også å ta bilder av ham med mobiltelefonene sine, gjerne med blits i mørke.

Dette siste understreket igjen hvordan det hele var tilgjort siden det neppe var mulig å få noen gode bilderesultater sent på kvelden om vinteren. Historikeren var sikkert et lett bytte for denne gjengen: I flere år hadde han hatt arbeidsuker på opptil 70 timer og hadde dermed engasjert seg lite sosialt; det han hadde av venner var stort sett faglige kontakter som bodde i utlandet.

Historikerens leilighet i Lille Bislett Det var spesielt tapt nattesøvn som ble et problem for historikeren. Han hadde flere kroniske sykdommer, inkludert ulcerøs colitt (inflammatorisk tarmsykdom). Etter gjentatte oppvåkninger hver eneste natt og sjelden mer enn 4 timers søvn ble han dehydrert og fikk forstoppelse, noe som i sin tur førte til skader og blødninger i tarmkanalen som han aldri hadde hatt før tross 20 år med ulcerøs colitt. Etter å ha opplevd 4 uker med denne brutale behandlingen og noen mislykkede forsøk på å prøve å bevege seg utenfor Oslo (han ble forfulgt av politiet både i Asker og i Bergen) bestemte han seg så for at det mest ansvarlige i forhold til helsesituasjonen var å reise utenlands. Han var overbevist om at det han var blitt utsatt for var en utenomrettslig straffereaksjon på fotograferingen, men forventet at selv om ikke Norge lenger respekterte hans grunnleggende menneskerettigheter (inkludert retten til å bli betraktet som uskyldig inntil domfellelse i en eventuell straffesak) så ville andre stater gjøre det.

Norsk politi fortsetter mishandlingen i utlandet Den 22. mars 2011 fløy historikeren fra Bergen til Schiphol i Nederland og fortsatte til London for å finne en leilighet der. Til hans overraskelse oppdaget han at han ble fulgt av norsk politi også dit. Flere av de norske politibetjentene som fulgte etter ham til London var lett gjenkjennelige, og de klarte å få Metropolitan Police til å sarmabeide om et lignende trakasseringsregime som det han hadde vært utsatt for i Norge (forstyrrelse av nattesøvnen på hotellet der han bodde og fotfølging overalt på dagtid). Han dro derfor videre til USA den 25. mars, men fant ut at 3 av de norske hovedpersonene i aksjonen mot ham var på samme fly til Newark. Da de ankom Newark kom det ytterligere en delegasjon med 10-15 norske politifolk i sivil som han delvis kjente igjen som spanere fra Oslo; de viftet med de norske passene sine mens de ventet på å gå gjennom passkontrollen.

Historikeren innså nå til sin fortvilelse at betjentene fra Oslo-politiet klarte å få amerikansk politi til å samarbeide i den ulovlige forfølgelsesaksjonen. Han hadde tidligere gjort et høyt antall inviterte presentasjoner for amerikanske myndigheter i forbindelse med Midtøsten-forskningen sin (blant annet CIA), og hadde håpet at dette skulle bidra til en mer fornuftig respons fra amerikansk politi. Men den gang ei. Den 19. april 2011, etter at norsk og amerikansk politi hadde fotfulgt ham i mer enn 50 døgn på amerikansk territorium, gikk FBI så langt som å sende en bogus-deltaker fra National Geospatial Intelligence Agency inn på et CIA-seminar i Virginia der historikeren holdt et invitert foredrag. I en av de mer absurde konfrontasjonene mellom FBI og CIA i amerikansk historie bidro norsk politi på denne måten til å forstyrre en CIA-konferanse som hadde kostet mer enn 50 000 dollar å arrangere. Tilsvarende var historikeren invitert til å spise lunsj med en av statssekretærene i State Department på National Press Club den 22. april, bare for å finne at bordet de satt på var omgitt av sivilspanere travelt opptatt med å blitsfotografere hverandre mer eller mindre konstant.

Historikeren reiste deretter til Gulfen, der han var invitert til å delta på en Midtøstenkonferanse i Qatar. Men på flyet dit ble han igjen fulgt av norske og amerikanske spanere, som fortsatte å plage ham på hotellet han bodde på og endog infiltrerte den akademiske konferansen han deltok på (nordmenn i Qatar skiller seg relativt klart ut i en folkemengde).

Han dro videre til Jordan for å gjøre en siste appell til amerikanske myndigheter gjennom ambassaden i Amman, men dette slo feil. Han ante ugler i mosen da en angivelig stasjonssjef for CIA opptrådte merkelig i en samtale de to hadde sammen. Historikeren ville likevel gjøre et siste forsøk i EU-landene og dro til Italia og Frankrike der han også deltok på konferanser relatert til Midtøsten. Men trakasseringen og politiforfølgelsen fortsatte også der med uforminsket kraft.

I Nederland: Fra menneskerettighetsforbrytelser til forbrytelser mot menneskeheten

I juni 2011 bestemte historikeren seg for at han hadde reist nok, ikke minst siden helseproblemene hadde tiltatt i så sterk grad at han trengte legehjelp. I tillegg virket det som om norsk politi kom til å følge etter ham uansett hvor han reiste, spesielt siden de hadde fulgt ham til et tredje-verden land som Jordan. Han syntes derfor at det ikke var noe poeng å bruke mer penger på flybilletter. Han bestemte seg for å bli værende på ett sted for å forsøke å produsere en klage- eller straffesak mot politiet og tenkte at den internasjonale deltakelsen ville roe seg når det ikke lenger var så eksotiske destinasjoner og heftige bonuspoeng involvert.

Selv om dette trekket til slutt førte til noe redusert norsk deltakelse i operasjonen i løpet av høsten 2011, så fortsatte forfølgelsen i Nederland. På en del måter begynte politiets metoder å anta en enda mer vulgær form siden nederlenderne bevisst involverte brede lag av befolkningen i hetskampanjen. I praksis rekrutterte nederlandsk politi befolkningen i to småbyer – først kystbyen Noordwijk fra juli 2011 til januar 2012 og deretter en liten landsby i innlandet som heter Maasdam fra februar 2012 til juli 2012 – til å mobbe historikeren døgnet rundt. I Noordwijk foregikk hetsingen primært på Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin, der historikeren bodde i tilsammen 6 måneder. I Maasdam var sannsynligvis mer enn halve befolkningen involvert. «Heksejakt» er sannsynligvis den beste beskrivelsen av det som foregikk, og siden historikeren var avhengig av å gå lange turer hver dag på grunn av helsetilstanden bød det seg rikelig med anledninger for politiet til å plage ham i samarbeid med lokalbefolkningen.

Vandrerute i Noordwijk der historikeren ble daglig plaget av nederlandsk politi fra juli 2011 til januar 2012

Et særlig avskyelig element i metodebruken til nederlandsk politi var den bevisste involveringen av mindreårige barn og handicappede mennesker, inkludert psykisk utviklingshemmede. Disse gruppene deltok i fotfølgingen i mye høyere antall enn hva man skulle forvente utfra deres prosentandel i befolkningen. Når staten indoktrinerer små barn til å tro at politiet har rett til å drive avstraffelse utenfor domsstolene og at samfunnet har rett til å mobbe enkeltindivider så kommer man inn på områder som kan diskuteres som potensielle forbrytelser mot menneskeheten – ikke for hva de gjorde mot historikeren (det var «bare» ordinære menneskerettighetsforbrytelser), men for hva de systematisk gjorde mot et høyt antall små barn som vanskelig kan motsette seg påbud fra foreldre og politi om å delta i slike forbrytelser.

Langs denne ruten i Maasdam ble historikeren daglig plaget av nederlandsk politi fra februar til juli 2012 Fra juni 2012 økte nederlenderne intensiteten i operasjonen mot historikeren – og særlig forstyrrelsen av nattesøvn – til et nivå der det kunne klassifiseres som fysisk tortur. Det dreide seg om gjentatte intervaller på mer enn 60 timer uten noe søvn i det hele tatt. Det er en ironi i disse stalkingoperasjonene at politiet innledningsvis ofte samarbeider med vide lag av befolkningen i tiltak som oppfattes som «myke» i den forstand at det «bare» dreier seg om litt bråk og mobbing. Vanligvis har dette kun en begrenset effekt, og det er politiets egne tiltak nattestid, som minner mer om tradisjonell fysisk tortur, som er det som setter offeret under ulidelig press.

Når fotfølgingsaksjoner ødelegger for ærlig politiarbeid Selv om norsk deltagelse i denne merkelige politioperasjonen nå er i mindre skala enn hva den var opprinnelig så er det den norske staten som må ta ansvar for

menneskerettighetsforbrytelser som norske politifolk selv har begått og/eller har instigert i et tosifret antall land. Hvordan kan den norske regjeringen forklare at norsk politi bruker så store ressurser i utlandet på å ulovlige forfølge og trakassere en person som ikke en gang er norsk statsborger? (Offeret i denne saken ble født i Norge men har statsborgerskap i et annet EU-land.) Det eneste Oslo-politiet har oppnådd er å kaste bort millioner av norske skattebetaleres kroner, ødelegge Norges omdømme internasjonalt, samt å skape problemer for Midtøsten-forskningen til historikeren som de forfulgte. Dette er analyser som flere NATO-allierte fremdeles bruker i sitt arbeid. Det må også reises grunnleggende spørsmål om beredskap, prioritering og ressursbruk i Oslo-politiet når de i flere måneder i 2011 brukte hundretusener av kroner og store mannskaper på å plage historikeren i Seattle, mer enn 7000 kilometer fra Oslo. Fantes det ikke mer presserende oppgaver på hjemmebane i denne perioden, som for eksempel terrorisme-problematikk og senerere en bølge av voldtekter ?

Hvorvidt Europol har vært involvert i denne saken er uvisst. Men uansett viser saken hvordan internasjonalt politidiplomati – i bunn og grunn politifolk som elsker å reise utenlands på dyre hoteller i stedet for å gjøre normalt politiarbeid – kan underminere enkeltstaters mer fundamentale utenrikspolitiske interesser. Saken utgjør også et rystende vitnesbyrd om hvor lite nasjonal suverenitet som gjenstår i forbindelse med våre dagers internasjonale politisamarbeid, der en fullstendig ulovlig aksjon som bryter både med universelle menneskerettigheter og nasjonal lovgivning i de fleste av disse landene går på skinner fra land til land uten noen som helst form for juridisk overoppsyn. Det er fullstendig underordnet i denne sammenhengen at denne enkeltsaken muligens er unik i forhold til antallet land som var involvert. Det viktige er at alle disse landene hadde eksisterende kapasitet til å utføre nokså uniforme fotfølgingsopplegg, og at man alle steder var beredt til å reprodusere Oslo-politiets vanvittige tilnærming, inkludert en fullstendig middelaldersk tenkning om avstraffelse, helt uten respekt for disse landenes egne lover og domstoler. Politiets freidighet, og særlig det faktum at man ikke ser noe problem i å bruke disse ulovlige metodene mot en internasjonalt anerkjent ekspert på rettsstatsproblematikk, tyder ganske enkelt på at vi har med toppen av et ganske stort isfjell å gjøre hva angår metodebruk. Når politiet kan opptre på denne måten overfor en person som realistisk kan forventes å dele sine erfaringer med andre, hvordan går norsk politi frem overfor folk som kanskje er mindre tilbøyelig til å fortelle sin historie?

I moderne vestlig juridisk filosofi legger man vanligvis til grunn at den som mistenkes for noe av politiet har rett til å 1.) få informasjon om hvilken lov han eller hun skal ha brutt; 2.) få anledning til å forklare seg; 3.) få saken avgjort av en uavhengig domstol; og 4.) dersom han eller hun blir funnet skyldig i noe, få ilagt straff på en human måte gjennom bøter, samfunnstjeneste eller fengsel. Dette er helt grunnleggende rettigheter som vi rutinemessig deler ut til folk som er anklaget for de grusomste forbrytelser, inkludert terrorisme, mord og misbruk av barn. Men i denne saken om kontroversiell

gatefotografering skulle de altså ikke gjelde! I stedet har norsk politi opptrådt som jury, dommer og bøddel. Sammenlignet med hva historikeren gjorde «mot» sine motiver gjorde politiet det logisk motsatte: Han hadde aldri fulgt etter noen hjem eller fotografert dem mer enn ved ett tilfelle. Med andre ord, dersom noen opplevde det som ubehagelig å bli fotografert, så varte det uansett bare noen sekunder av deres liv. Det er en type eksponeringsrisiko som vi vanligvis godtar som en del av å bo i et liberalt, vestlig samfunn. Men politiet gjorde det stikk motsatte i sin iver etter å avstraffe: Med en glød som minner om det religiøse politiet i flere Midøsten-land invaderte de privathjemmet til offeret i saken og plaget ham i offentlig sfære så vel som hjemme, døgnet rundt, i mer enn ett og et halvt år – og med fysiske arr som sannsynligvis er blitt varige som resultat.

Oppsummert viser denne saken hvordan fotfølging ikke bare er ulovlig og bryter med fundamentale rettsprinsipper. Politistalking kan også føre til at hele politiavdelinger blir så fordypet i ulovlige aksjoner at de mister oversikten og feilprioriterer. Dette understreker i sin tur hvordan den kriminaliteten som begåes i rettsstatens navn kanskje er den kriminaliteten som er mest undergravende i forhold til rettsstaten selv.

July 15, 2012

Ulikt en del andre land (som for eksempel Nederland) har ikke Norge formelt tatt i bruk stalking som politimetode. Ikke desto mindre har kreativ språkbruk fra norske myndigheter sin side gjort det mulig for norsk politi å ta i bruk politistalking som uformell metode, samtidig som norske medier kun i begrenset skala har kommentert dette nye fenomenet.

Den vanligste termen for politistalking på norsk er «fotfølging». Det skal understrekes at norske medier av og til bruker denne termen upresist i forhold til politimetoder.

Eksempelvis fantes det et såkalt VIC-prosjekt i Oslo for noen år siden (Very Important Criminal) som ble omtalt som «fotfølging» i massemedia uten at dette var dekkende. Det dreide seg ikke i dette tilfellet om at enkeltindivider ble usatt for ekstrem spaning (som er det vanlige i politistalking) men heller at vanekriminelle havnet på en liste over personer som ble ekspedert raskere gjennom rettssystemet dersom de (tilfeldigvis) ble tatt for noe.

Man kan kanskje hevde at prinsippet om likhet for loven ble brutt i dette tilfellet; ikke desto mindre var det en tilnærming som i det minste forholdt seg til loven i den forstand at den produserte normale domfellelser samtidig som politiet på sin side også holdt seg innenfor lovens rammer.

Det er en annen og vanligere bruk av fotfølging som skal omtales her. Dette dreier seg om overdrevet spaning på personer eller miljøer som man ikke mistenker for noe spesifikt lovbrudd men som politiet av ulike grunner ønsker å sette under press. Spaningen tjener med andre ord ikke som etterforskning men som et preventivt instrument og/eller en form for avstraffelse (det siste spesielt dersom aksjonen blir svært invasiv eller vedvarer over tid slik at den vanskelig kan forsvares utfra en preventiv logikk). Ulikt VIC-prosjektet er dette altså en politimetode som direkte underminerer rettsstaten – dels siden den ikke referer til loven i det hele tatt som grunnlag for mistanke, dels fordi nesten hvert eneste skritt politiet tar i disse sakene i seg selv utgjør lovbrudd. For en stor del dreier fotfølging seg om metoder som før 2005 var kjent som «urovirksomhet», men som på den tiden var vesentlig mindre høyteknologisk i karakter og som hovedsaklig var rettet mot narkotikamiljøer.

Fotfølging og norsk lov Ulikt situasjonen en del andre europeiske land har ikke norsk lov noen veldig spesifikk grenseoppgang av hvor mye eller lite spaningsvirksomhet politiet kan drive. Men i 2004 kom i hvert fall et juridisk ekspertutvalg opp med en tolkning av gjeldende rett som la til grunn at politiet i det minste må ha konkret mistanke om et spesifikt, straffbart lovbrudd for å sette i gang spaning (NOU 6/2004). Med andre ord er ikke spaning for spaningens skyld tillatt. NOUen til denne gruppen fra 2004 la likeledes vekt på at at spaningen må være proporsjonal i forhold til den antatte forbrytelsens alvorlighet, og konkluderte med at overdreven spaningsvirksomhet vil ofte kunne komme i konflikt med europeisk menneskerettighetslovgivning. For mer invasive spaningsmetoder, inkludert bruk av sporingsinstrumenter og skjult overvåking, krever norsk lov at det må foreligge mistanke om alvorlig kriminalitet med spesielt høy strafferamme (eller at spaningen med rimelig sjanse skal kunne bidra til å oppklare eller forhindre slik alvorlig kriminalitet).

Det skal legges til at selv om Norge ikke har spesifikk lovgivning mot stalking, så finnes det en svært spesifikk paragraf mot maktmisbruk begått av offentlige tjenestemenn i situasjoner som minner om stalking: Straffelovens paragraf 117a gir en strafferamme på 15 års fengsel for offentlig tjenestemann som forårsaker «alvorlig psykisk smerte… med den hensikt å straffe, true eller tvinge noen». Ofte er nettopp dette svært dekkende for den dynamikken politiet ønsker å oppnå når de bruker fotfølging som metode.

Det som finnes av fragmentariske detaljopplysninger om fotfølgingsoperasjoner tyder på at norsk politi ofte går vesentlig lenger enn de anbefalingene omkring gjeldende rett som ble fremsatt av NOU-utvalget i 2004. For eksempel oppgav medlemmer av fotballsupporterklubber («causals») i Bergen i 2008 at de ble fulgt av spanere bokstavelig talt fra de gikk hjemmefra til de kom hjem igjen, helt uten at det forelå noen mistanke om

noe spesifikk forbrytelse som skulle oppklares (BT, 8. mai 2008). Lignende operasjoner har vært igangsatt mot ulike gjengmiljøer i Oslo. I slutten av 2008 kunne Aftenposten rapportere at fotfølgingen fra politiets side var blitt såpass nærgående at pakistanske gjengmiljøer dro til skogs for å få fred – og at Oslo-politiet bad om å få terrenggående kjøretøyer for å kunne følge etter dem også der (Aftenposten 21. desember 2008).

Akkurat som i Nederland er det også i Norge slik at politiets egen diskurs omkring disse operasjonene er en nyttig kilde. Flere politifolk har offentlig uttalt at de hadde forventet et stort antall trakasseringssaker etter at Oslo-politiet startet det såkalte Gjengprosjektet i 2006. Hvorfor skulle de forvente denslags hvis de bare hadde til hensikt å bruke tradisjonelle politimetoder? (Norsk Politi, nr. 2, juni 2009.) Politiet omtaler også selv disse operasjonene med språk som gjør det klart at spaningen går vesentlig lengre enn tilfeldig observasjon: I en omtale av urometoder fortalte en ledende politibetjent i Oslo-politiet i 2009 at de ikke lenger ville «herse med» de slitne narkotikamiljøene på samme måte som de hadde gjort tidligere (Aftenposten, 10. juni 2009).

Politiets språkbruk er også viktig for å forstå hva det er man egentlig ønsker å oppnå med disse operasjonene. Eirik Jensen fra avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet i Oslo-politiet har gjentatte ganger sagt at målet er å marginalisere grupper og individer så mye at de blir oppfattet som «spedalske» (Aftenposten, 10. mai 2007). Tilsvarende bruker man terminologi som «en-prosent-miljøer» når målet for operasjonene er MC-klubber, igjen en indikasjon på at politiet tenker minoritet og marginalisering. Flere av disse operasjonene har da også kodenavn med en uttalt hevngjerrig brodd, som da Oslo-politiet satte i gang «Operasjon Nemesis» mot norske gjengmiljøer i eksil i Brasil, eller da de organiserte «Operasjon husløs» i Oslo (som bidro til at mange prostituerte ble drevet fra hjemmene sine selv om det er kjøp og ikke salg av sex som ifølge loven er ulovlig).

Avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet i Oslo-politiet som toneangivende aktør Det er avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet ved Oslo-politiet som antagelig er den hyppigste brukeren av stalking-metoder i Norge. Dette er en politiavdeling som ser ut til å fungere som en magnet på norske politifolk og politiadvokater med uvanlige tolkninger av lovverket og teft for å utfordre lovens grenser. Ett eksempel er Tom Østreng, som tidligere tjenestegjorde i ulike bydeler i Oslo, og som gjorde seg bemerket med en rekke oppsiktsvekkende tolkninger innen feltet hundejuss. Da Østreng var på Majorstuen prøvde han å forby hundeeiere å la hunder gå løs i Frognerparken. Selv om gode borgere gjorde ham oppmerksom på et kommuneskilt som spesifikt ga tillatelse til slik aktivitet lot ikke Østreng seg stoppe (Aftenposten 22. juli 1996). Noen år senere flyttet Østreng til Stovner og involverte seg i en rekke kontroversielle avlivningssaker av kamphunder. I fravær av et klart lovverk erklærte Østreng at politiet hadde «hjemmel til å bruke hodet» for å

bestemme hvilke hunder som skulle skytes, og at det avgjørende var om eierne i politiets øyne var «seriøse hundeeiere som er glad i hundene sine» eller ei (Aftenposten Aften, 12. juli 2002; 13. november 2002). I ett tilfelle ble en hund dømt til avliving for så å bli sittende 2 måneder på «dødskennel» før den ble reddet i tolvte time med benådning fra Statens Dyrehelsetilsyn som i en unntaksavgjørelse overprøvet politiet.

Disse eksemplene illustrerer problemer i forhold til viktige juridiske grunnprinsipper som likhet for loven og uskyldspresumsjonen hos en betjent som i dag har vesentlig mer makt og midler og rår over mer enn hundeliv i avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet. Et annet eksempel er Harald Bøhler, som har spilt en fremtredende rolle i avdelingen blant annet som leder for STOP-prosjektet rettet mot sexkjøp. Dette prosjektet har vært preget av klager om brutale metoder, uklare resultater hva angår reduksjon av sekjøp, og flere mislykkede forsøk på å domfelle folk politiet oppfatter som fiender. I ett av disse forsøkene prøvde Bøhler å definere pornoblader som «internett-bordeller» som skulle kunne straffeforfølges for hallikvirksomhet. Høyesterett sa til slutt klart fra om at dette var fåfengt (VG 28. otkober 2011). En annen av disse sakene involverte et forsøk på å få Telenor til å blokkere en nettside som var involvert i prostitusjon i Norge men som var basert utenlands. Politiet snakket i denne saken ikke lenge om «loven» men om «samfunnsansvar». Bøhlers argument syntes oppkonstruert: Han mente tilsynelatende at i teorien kan en hver prostitusjonssak knyttes til mulig menneskehandel – som er en vesentlig mer alvorlig forbrytelse, og som dermed gir politiet videre fullmakter (VG 19. juni 2011). Hva angår politimetoder har Bøhler blant annet gått i bresjen for en kontroversiell metode som går ut på å beslaglegge prostituertes mobiltelefoner for så å bruke dem til å provosere frem sexkjøp fra potensielle kunder (VG, 16. september 2009; 6. november 2009). Han har likeledes klaget over den begrensete adgangen til å bruke avlytting av personbiler.

Det mer grunnleggende poenget knyttet til STOP-prosjektet er at mye av politiets aggressive oppførsel mot prostituerte og huseiere sannsynligvis kunne vært straffeforfulgt som psykisk tortur utført av offentlig tjenestemann med hensikt om å true og tvinge under straffelovens paragraf 117a (se for eksempel «Lovendring redder ingen», Aftenposten 20. november 2008 om hvordan politiets fremferd oppleves av de som utsettes for den). Dette er poeng som kunne vært brukt for mye av virksomheten til avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet, men STOP-prosjektet er best kjent siden politiet har brukt mye energi på å skryte om det på nasjonale og internasjonale konferanser.

Lignende tendenser kan sees hos en av de nyeste politiadvokatene i org. krim. avdelingen, Jorid Kile Berg. Da hun debuterte som påtaleansvarlig i 1999 gikk hun friskt ut og anklaget en lærer for pedofili i en innfløkt sak med angivelige forgreininger til

Filippinene. Argumentasjonen var så svak at selv tidligere politifolk kritiserte den, og retten avviste hennes krav om 4 ukers varetektsfengsling av mistenkte (Dagbladet 23. februar 1999). Etter en uke ble mistenkte sluppet fri og saken ble henlagt, men læreren hadde allerede blitt utsatt for betydelig æreskrenkelse gjennom den grunnløse arrestasjonen. Da Kile Berg senere omsider klarte å fakke Lommemannen gikk det heller ikke helt knirkefritt for seg. Familien til den domfelte klaget over at også de var blitt utsatt for overvåking og trakassering fra politiets side (VG, 4. mars 2008). Media skrev likeledes kritiske artikler om hvordan Kile Berg dvelte i det uendelige ved strafferettslig foreldete forhold for å oppnå en forvaringsdom (Aftenposten 4. mars 2010).

Til slutt må den tidligere lederen for såkalte «spesielle operasjoner» i org. krim. avdelingen, Eirik Jensen, nevnes. Jensen antaes å ha vært toneangivende i utformingen av de mer utradisjonelle politimetodene avdelingen hans har brukt i tiden etter 2005. Han er sjelden spesifikk på nøyaktig hva arbeidet til gruppen hans går ut på, men ord som «press» og «stress» brukes nesten hele tiden. Igjen er dette ting som kan lukte tvang og trussel etter Straffelovens 117a. Og i tillegg til å snakke om å gjøre visse miljøer og personer «spedalske», rammer Jensen gjennom sine operasjoner ofte familie og venner til dem som er målet for politiets aksjoner. I 2007 ble av og til hele familier varetektsfengslet, angivelig fordi politiet skulle vise familien at å ha nære bånd til gjengmedlemmer var en «risikosport» (Aftenposten 10. mai 2007, VG 9. november 2007). Jensen er i dag spesialrådgiver for sjefen for org. krim avdelingen, Einar Aas. Aas har gitt endel intervjuer med media der han bare i liten grad refererer til juss men ofte bruker sjøkrigsterminologi (blant annet ønsker han å «torpedere den kriminelle skuten midtskips», Motgift nr. 3, 2010).

Disse eksemplene viser hvordan ledende skikkelser i Oslo-politiets avdeling for organisert kriminalitet har for vane å være ekstremt selektive i utvalget av mål, og at de deretter velger å gå etter disse målene med nærmest grenseløse midler, ofte på en måte som reiser spørsmål om grunnleggende rettssikkerhetsaspekter. Nå skal det imidlertid ikke påståes at org. krim. avdelingen er alene i Oslo eller Norge en slik tilnærming. Avgående sjef for politiet i Oslo, Anstein Gjengedal, har tidligere uttalt at han ønsket å se alle gjengmedlemmer «bak lås og slå», tilsynelatende uavhengig av spørsmålet om hvor vidt disse folkene faktisk hadde begått straffbare forbrytelser eller ei (Aftenposten Aften, 22. november 2006). I Trondheim foreslo politiet på et tidspunkt å dele informasjon om sexkjøpere med arbeidsgivere, mens Kripos på nasjonalt plan har gitt uttrykk for støtte til Oslo-politiets marginaliseringstiltak overfor MC-miljøene.

Politisk støtte Det norske rettssystemet har til tider gjort en god jobb i form av å stagge org. krim. avdelingen og Oslo-politiet. Det samme kan derimot ikke sies om norske byråkrater og politikere. Tvert i mot har det norske politiske etablissementet ofte gitt eksplisitt støtte til utradisjonelle politimetoder inkludert politistalking. Alt for ofte har justiskomiteen i Stortinget – som domineres av Arbeiderpartiets Jan Bøhler – gitt etter for press fra Harald Bøhler og andre i org. krim. som krever videre fullmakter og godkjenning av nye metoder (se for eksempel VG 31. mai 2012). Tilsvarende tendenser ses på departementsnivå, hvor det i teorien skal finnes et visst oppsyn med politiets metodebruk. Etter det famøse forslaget fra Trondheims-politiet om å angi horekunder til arbeidsgivere klarte for eksempel ikke daværende justisminister Knut Storberget å komme opp med den tindrende klare avvisningen som han burde ha gitt (Stortinget, dokument 15:143, 2009-10).

Tilsvarende var det opposisjonens Per Sandberg (FrP)som i 2010 måtte dra til Brasil på vegne av justiskomiteen for å rydde opp etter tvilsom informasjonsutveksling mellom norsk og brasiliansk politi under Operasjon Nemesis (Dagbladet 2. juni 2010).

Det er kanskje heller ikke så overraskende at Politidirektoratet siden opprettelsen i 2001 sjelden har satt effektive begrensninger på politiets tiltagende bruk av tvilsomme og utradisjonelle metoder. I saker som for eksempel den såkalte colours-nekten (MC-medlemmer med klubbemblemer på klærne nektes adgang ved utesteder) har direktoratet fremstått som desorientert, krampaktig og i utakt med dominerende trender i europeisk rettighetstenkning (se særlig det publiserte brevet fra Politidirektoratet til politiet i Haugesund datert 5. januar 2012). I disse sakene er det ofte politiets motstandere – eksempelvis motorsykkelklubben Hells Angels – som målbærer plausible tolkninger av de relevante avsnittene av Grunnloven så vel som den europeiske menneskerettighetsonvensjonen. Men så har da også Politidirektoratets egen direktør gjennom 10 år, Ingelin Killengreen, flere ganger tatt til orde for samarbeid mellom politi, forsikringsselskaper, kommunale myndigheter og endog utesteder i korstoget mot MC-klubbene – tilsynelatende uten å ta hensyn til de vesentlige bruddene på prinsippet om likhet for loven som ville følge av en slik tilnærming.

Det er naturligvis fristende å datere fremveksten av autoritære politimetoder i Norge til tiden etter 11. september 2001 gitt den globale tendensen i en slik retning i denne perioden.

Men det gir mer mening å gå tilbake til Willy Haugli sin periode som politimester i Oslo og de langvarige konfliktene med Blitz-miljøet. Det var senere på 1990-tallet, under Hauglis etterfølger Ingelin Killengreen, at menneskerettighetsovergrep fra politiets side for alvor ble stuerent i norske politiske miljøer. Det mest vulgære eksempelet er kanskje de famøse tiltakene fra Oslo-politiet mot Kina-demonstrasjonene under det kinesiske statsbesøket i 1996, da Killengreen i bunn og grunn håndhevet kinesisk justis i Oslo for en dag og arresterte folk etter fargen på t-skjorten de hadde på seg. At Killengreen beholdt jobben etter den miseren sier en del om hvor langt fra sine edle prinsipper det norske politiske etablissementet allerede da var rede til å gå.

Men historien om utradisjonelle politimetoder i perioden før 2001 kan heller ikke begrenses til Killengreen og hennes venner i Arbeiderpartiet. Det er ganske symptomatisk at det var Venstres Odd Einar Dørum som stod for en vesentlig del av ekspansjonen av det som tidligere hadde vært ulovlige overvåkingsmetoder i 1999. En sint men profetisk lederartikkel i Dagbladet 4. mai 1999 understreket det ironiske i at erkeliberale Venstre tok Norge et steg nærmere Big Brother, men få i den norske politikereliten lot til å bry seg.

Etter 11. september 2001 fant det i Norge såvel som i resten av verden sted en generell bevegelse i retning av stadig mer invasive politimetoder. Det var imidlertid ikke før 2005 at Oslo-politiets metoder endret seg for alvor. Killengreen i Politidirektoratet og Eirik Jensen i den nyopprettede avdelingen for organisert kriminalitet i Oslo-politiet så ut til å operere i tandem i perioder. Et forsterkende element var gjengdrapene på Aker Brygge i 2006, som åpenbart skapte frykt langt inn i det norske politiske etablissementet. I kjølvannet av denne episoden ga norske politikere Oslo-politiet mer eller mindre carte blanche til å drive Gjengprosjektet og andre utradisjonelle tiltak mot det man oppfattet som samfunnsproblemer. I 2007 kunne Eirik Jensen regne med ubegrenset finansiell støtte fra Stortinget, og svært få spørsmål ble stilt omkring metodebruk (Aftenposten 26. mai 2007). I et intervju på den tiden sa Jensen det slik: «Ingen har blandet seg borti den taktikken vi har fulgt. Vi hadde aldri greid dette uten ekstramidler fra Politidirektoratet og det spillerom politidirektør Ingelin Killengreen har gitt oss. Også på politisk hold har vi støtte. Dette er viktig.» (Aftenposten 10. mai 2007) På denne måten finnes det en høyst direkte forbindelseslinje mellom den brutale behandlingen Tibet-demonstratene fikk under det kinesiske statsbesøket i 1996 til politiets forsøk de siste årene på å diskriminere medlemmer av MC-klubber som går med klubbemblemer på klærne. Det er skremmende ahistorisk at et land som nedkjempet nazismen med toppluer og binders i jakkeslag skulle tillate denne typen overgrep mot de mykeste former for ytringsfrihet bare et halvt århundre senere! Det er også uhyggelig å se hvordan norske toppolitikere tilsynelatende ikke evner å fatte at politiets unike legitimitet og viktige samfunssrolle står i fare for å bli skadet hver eneste gang politiet selv overtrer loven i stedet for å håndheve den.

På et mer grunnleggende plan er det umulig å se norsk politis utradisjonelle stalkingmetoder i isolasjon fra andre indikasjoner på mer dyptgripende problemer i det norske rettsvesenet. Fremfor alt gjelder dette unødvendig varetektsfensgling, som Norge gjentatte ganger har blitt kritisert for internasjonalt, blant annet av Amnesty og FN. Til å være et demokrati som mange tror tilhører superklassen har Norge en beklagelig tendens til å sette folk bak lås og slå uten noe spesielt godt juridisk grunnlag. Forhåpentligvis kan mer kunnskap om norsk politis tvilsomme bruk av fotfølging også bidra til å rette oppmerksomheten mot disse dypere, institusjonelle og systemiske problemene i Norges

h책ndtering av noen av de mest grunnleggende prinsippene i moderne vestlig juridisk filosofi.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

August 6, 2012

[Also available in Norwegian – norsk oversettelse her: https://policestalking.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/feilprioriteringene-for-utoya-tragedienoslo-politiets-elitespanere-dro-pa-baertur-pa-tre-kontinenter/] On 13 August, the independent inquiry into the tragic terror attacks in Norway on 22 July last year will present its official report. Unfortunately, the report is likely to focus on the trees rather than the wood. In particular, the independent commission will likely ignore

some shocking facts about the priorities of the Oslo police during the 4 months immediately preceding the attacks, including the fact that the elite undercover unit of the Oslo police spent millions of Norwegian kroner harassing and mistreating a chronically ill photographer instead of following up tipoffs relating to the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.

The birth of a flawed police operation In order to appreciate the budgetary constraints of the Oslo police and the necessity of making priorities, it can be useful to revisit comments to media made by a leading figure of the organised crime unit of the Oslo police in January 2011. In what amounted to a prophetic warning, Eirik Jensen told Aftenposten on 10 January 2011 that due to internal budget cuts, the undercover activities of the unit would be confined to “a limited number of criminal arenas” in 2011. Specifically he warned that the monitoring of potential terror suspects might become a casualty of the tight budgets. In that same article, the head of the organised crime unit confirmed the close links between the undercover unit of the Oslo police and Norwegian secret police (PST), with the latter often relying on the former. In a previous interview, police sources had confirmed that the Oslo police could do a maximum of 4 individually targeted around-the-clock undercover surveillance operations at one time (Aftenposten, 2 January 2011).

Eirik Jensen in Aftenposten, 10 January 2011 Whether those media headlines in early January 2011 actually helped improve the budgetary situation for the undercover work of the Oslo police is unknown. What is a fact, however, is that in the subsequent 4 months – the period leading up to the Oslo attacks and the Utøya tragedy on 22 July 2011 – the undercover priorities of the Oslo police shifted to something rather different from a terrorist threat. Instead of following up tipoffs relating to the perpetrator of the 22 July attacks, Anders Behring Breivik, the Oslo police had something they considered to be far more important on their mind: They were busy tailing a controversial photographer around the world, spending millions of taxpayer kroner and

covering altogether 3 continents in what was basically a vindictive harassment operation with zero judicial value.

The target of the operations was a historian who had engaged in street photography for a contemporary fashion history project. Despite such photography being perfectly legal under Norwegian law and a recent ruling of the Oslo district court from 2009 specifically upholding the right of citizens to engage in photography (including mobile photography) in publicly accessible areas, the Oslo police disliked his activities. However, instead of ever warning the historian or entering any kind of dialogue with him to clear up any possible misunderstandings (this would likely have solved the problem at minimal cost), the police in February 2011 suddenly initiated a massive harassment campaign against him, apparently designed to put pressure on him to leave the country. Around the clock, the police tailed him using “conspicuous surveillance” methods. At daytime, they successfully infiltrated his workplace; at night they targeted him in his private apartment using sleep deprivation through constant noise from unmarked police cars outside.

Through the use of this kind of harassment and mistreatment between February and March 2011, the Oslo police succeeded in putting so much pressure on the historian that he left Norway on 22 March. He had concluded that the police operation was so obviously illegal that it would likely have to be confined to Norway. It is true that this kind of extra-judicial harassment operation is not altogether uncommon in Europe and North America, where it constitutes a variant of modern policing techniques that seriously threatens to undermine the most fundamental rule of law principles but which nevertheless has become quite common. What was somewhat unusual in this case, though, was that subsequent to achieving their assumed aim – expulsion – the Oslo police continued to trail the man abroad. Over the next year and a half, in a multi-million scandal of an international police operation, the Oslo police instigated continued harassment and human rights violations by the local police in altogether 9 other countries in order to continue their illegal and extrajudicial operation against the historian. Essentially, the Oslo police embarked on a punitive expedition whose inhumane character poses a stark contrast to one of the few existing legal verdicts relating to mobile photography in Norway. In an extreme case involving a gynecologist surreptitiously photographing more than 2,000 pictures of the genitals of a large number of unknowing female patients during consultations, a mere fine of 25,000 kroner (USD 4,000) was given in late 2010. In other words, in this case involving street photography, Norwegian police are not even trying to relate to the relevant signals from the Norwegian judiciary. They are making up the law entirely according to their own minds.

Human rights crimes at home and abroad

On 22 March, the historian travelled by air from Bergen to Schiphol in the Netherlands. He felt he was being followed by the Norwegian police aboard the plane and immediately after landing bought another ticket for London. As he boarded British Airways flight BA439 bound for Heathrow less than an hour later, a leading police officer of the Oslo police, a handsomely dressed, slim, slightly below average height man with full dark grey hair in his late 50s, stood waiting for him at the check-in counter and followed him aboard. Upon arrival at Heathrow, he was tailed to Hotel Renaissance in London’s Chancery Court area, where more leading officers of Oslo police and its organised crime unit arrived that same night. During the night, the officers kept the historian awake by endlessly running the motor of a car right beneath his hotel room, exactly as they had done in Oslo for more than a month. At daytime, the Norwegian officers were joined by the Metropolitan police and chased the man around the streets of London.

On 25 March, the historian decided to leave the UK. As he sat in the Sky Team lounge at Heathrow prior to departure preparing to leave on Continental’s flight CO111 to Newark in the United States, the same Norwegian officer in the 50s that had followed him from Schiphol to London three days earlier came and sat right by him again, reading a sports magazine. He was joined by two more leading officers of the Oslo police. One of them was a somewhat younger guy with slightly thin, dark hair who appeared to have been a leading operator in the car harassment patrols in Oslo the previous month. The third was a female with Nordic looks, blond hair in a pageboy, not looking very much like a street cop.

When CO111 touched down at Newark 10 hours later and the passengers disembarked, they were joined at immigration by a group of at least 10 people openly brandishing their Norwegian passports. The historian to a large extent recognised them as undercover police officers from Oslo. They had arrived from Oslo that same day, probably via the direct Continental flight from Oslo or the SAS flight via Copenhagen. The group was a mix of seasoned undercover police officers along with some very young recruits; the youngest police officer was in her early twenties.

After having cleared immigration, the group of police officers left Newark airport in a hired van. For the subsequent one and a half month, the same group – and a steady stream of replacements from Oslo – continued to spend the budget of the organised crime unit of the Oslo police by staying in five-star hotels, renting expensive SUVs and travelling on first class domestic air flights in the US as they continued their stalking operation of the controversial photographer around the clock. Back in Oslo, no attention was being paid by the police to the first tip-offs relating to the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.

Ritz Carlton Pentagon City During the course of the operation, some of the Norwegian police personnel changed. But the senior official of the Oslo police who had first followed the historian from Schiphol to London remained active throughout April and May: He was in Washington DC on 1 April, in Ottawa in Canada on 16 April, and in DC again at the Marriott Wardman Park on 19 April. Two other leading officers stood out as particularly active. One was a bearded senior official in his 50s who was at the Ritz Carlton Pentagon City hotel in DC on 31 March, at the Intercontinental in Montreal in Canada on 7 April and again in DC on 17 April. The other was a 6 foot tall bald bouncer-type officer who stood out for his mild brown eyes in what was otherwise a very Viking-like appearance. On 26 April, he sat on the ninth row just behind the historian on United Airlines flight UA917 from Washington, DC to Seattle, where another big group of Oslo police officers joined him and spent the week from 26 April to 3 May. Apparently oblivious to the fact that they were now more than 7,000 kilometres from home and with the metre running very fast indeed, the members of the Oslo police still seemed to somehow believe in their slogan – “on the beat for a safer capital”.

Intercontinental Montreal

By May, Oslo police must have spent more than a million Norwegian kroner on the operation, without achieving any other result than harming the Middle East research of the historian (which was solicited by both the CIA and the State Department even as the harassment campaign was going on). This, however, did not deter the Norwegians from pursuing him further, to ever more exotic locations. The historian had thought the madness would stop in the Middle East, but it didn’t. On 7 May 2011, as he boarded Qatar Airways flight QR52 from Dulles airport outside DC to Doha, he was followed by a mix of Norwegian and American offices, the latter probably FBI. In Doha, two of the three leading Norwegian officers who had been with him all the time even appeared inside an academic conference devoted to political change in the Middle East. Other Norwegians followed him to Jordan and the Amman Marriott in mid-May, where he recognized one of the youngest female officers who had landed in Newark two months earlier.

Moevenpick Doha By late May 2011, as Anders Behring Breivik made his final preparations for the lethal 22 July attacks back in Norway, the expensive overseas photographer hunt of the Oslo police continued to tie up resources, personnel and the general priorities of the force for the fourth month running.

The last phase of large-scale Norwegian involvement in this absurd operation came in June–July 2011. After he had left Jordan, the historian was tailed by Norwegian officers to Middle East conferences in Como (Italy) and in Paris. On 3 June, as the historian sat on a cafÊ at Champs Elysees discussing the situation in the Middle East with representatives of the World Bank, a middle-aged, blond female Norwegian police officer with a small tattoo who had tailed him into a pharmacy in Oslo almost 4 months earlier sat on the next table, together with one of the main organised crime unit ringleaders in the operation.

Finally, due to health problems, the historian travelled to Netherlands in order to stay there for a longer period. On 22 July 2011, the historian was staying at the luxurious Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin in the seaside resort of Noordwijk. Even at this point in the middle of the Norwegian summer holiday and as the terror bombs exploded back home in Norway, the Oslo police remained heavily involved in a strange stalking operation on Dutch soil.

How police stalking distracts the police themselves It can be useful to juxtapose these two cases: The apparently limitless budget for trailing a controversial photographer versus the complete ignorance of various indications that Anders Behring Breivik was posing a threat (this included warnings from the Norwegian

customs services that he was purchasing materials that could be used for explosives from Poland, as well as involvement in weapons transactions and the purchase of large quantities of chemical fertiliser). This highlights the real reasons behind the complete failure of the Oslo police in detecting and suppressing the lethal 22 July attacks, which have to do with priorities and oversight. It should be stressed in this respect that even though there is no specific indication that the two cases at any point were weighed against each other, this really is beside the point. The more important aspect is that, through their priorities, Oslo police got stuck in a useless project that produced no judicial results and had zero beneficial effects apart from the air miles collected by the numerous police officers who took part. They thereby collectively took their eyes away from the ball in the critical months leading up to the 22 July attacks. Too many high officials of the organised crime unit of the Oslo police spent too much time and money on this silly project for it to be inconsequential for the undercover capacity and priorities of the Norwegian police more generally.

Clearly, by the time the photographer left Norway in March 2011, a more rational police unit would have prided themselves at getting rid of what was perceived as a problem (however much it was perfectly legal) and left it at that by celebrating their little triumph of expelling him. If there was fear that the photographer should miraculously have any appetite left for undesirable street photography activity after four weeks of aroundthe-clock mistreatment, Oslo police could easily and cheaply have liaised with foreign police services to discreetly keep the man under watch just in case – this could have been done at a fraction of the cost of what became essentially a punitive stalking operation paid for by millions of taxpayer kroner. Remember that this is the same Norwegian police that at the time of the 22 July attacks could only afford to have 1 – one – helicopter in an operational condition!

Perhaps in light of these facts, it is easier to grasp why Oslo police has become so uncommunicative in the period after the 22 July attacks. So far, in Norwegian media discussions of the question of police preparedness, there has been too much focus on the immediate hours and days before the attacks, and not sufficient attention to the dramatic contrast between the warning issued by Eirik Jensen of the organised crime unit of the Oslo police on 10 January 2011 about a lack of resources and the remarkable, super expensive five-star travel spree engaged in by that same unit during the subsequent six months leading up to the attacks.

One of the big unknowns in this affair is to what extent top police officials in Norway at any point gave the go-aheads that in theory would be required before this kind of waste of taxpayer money was allowed to go ahead. For example, the boss of the organised crime unit, Einar Aas, has previously said publicly that his subunits are largely autonomous.

Does that mean his approval was not needed? Lawyers interviewed in relation to the case suggest that, in theory, an operation on this scale would have to be approved by both the chief of the Oslo police as well as the director of the Norwegian police. The police chief of Oslo at the time was Anstein Gjengedal. The police director was Ingelin Killengreen, who had her last working day on 31 March (a week after the stalking operation had gone international) and was then replaced by an acting director, Vidar Refvik, who served until the new director of police, Øystein Mæland, began on 20 June 2011. Did they know and approve? Finally, it is not known for sure whether there was any involvement of the international desk of the prestigious Kripos (the equivalent of a CID in the Norwegian police). This would have been the standard procedure in any case involving international assistance.

There is also the question of how parts of Norwegian society at large got involved as in the madness of the Oslo police in this case. Tragically, members of the Labour party – the political party that was the main victim in the 22 July events – were among the volunteers that assisted the organised crime unit in harassing the historian as he was working on Middle East related research in Oslo in February and March 2011. Similarly, Norwegian lawyers, journalists and other members of the liberal professions were at various junctures enlisted by the police to put pressure on the historian. More generally speaking, over the five past years, the ruling Norwegian Labour party has emerged as one of the most zealous and uncritical supporters of dirty police techniques, including police stalking. This tendency got even more marked after a fatal, gang-related shooting incident at the glitzy Aker Brygge in 2006, after which point the organised crime unit of the Oslo police was generally given a free hand as regards budgets and few questions were asked regarding methods. The justice minister at the time of this operation and the 22 July bombings, Knut Storberget, has even appeared side by side with stalking expert Eirik Jensen at public conferences. Yet another individual close to the Labour party, former UN advisor Jan Egeland, gave Norwegian police a very public stamp approval in autumn 2011 shortly before leaving his job as head of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and moving on to the lofty Human Rights Watch. According to Egeland, Norwegian police working abroad are “first class” (Norsk Politi no. 2, June 2011).

Former NUPI director and UN undersecretary-general,

currently Europe director for Human Rights Watch Jan Egeland declares Norwegian police “first class” More broadly speaking, the case also reveals some of the fundamental weaknesses of Norway’s general national security architecture. Instead of having sufficient undercover capacity attached to the prestigious Kripos and PST (secret service), currently Norwegian national security remains hostage to capricious officers in the organised crime unit of the Oslo police sometimes described by the police themselves as semi-criminals (“stained, striped and Quislings”, Aftenposten, 15 January 2012). These officers are euphemistically referred to as undercover agents, but in some cases are nothing more than destructive, uneducated thugs that understand human rights and basic principles of due process no better than an average Syrian shabiha. Drunk on hypermodern technology, these officers are not enforcing the law; they are enforcing their own, kindergarten-level judicial fantasies. And they get paid overtime by Norway’s oh-so-pristine government to wake people up at night and wreak havoc in the most primitive ways imaginable. The irony of the case is of course that Norway generally has a clean and honest police constabulary, perhaps among the best in the world. Sadly, though, the undercover component of the Norwegian police comes across as exceptional in its ignorance, barbarism and lack of respect for human life. To add insult to injury, these most anti-democratic and judicially illiterate circles of the Oslo police were given the task of leading the investigation into the atrocities of 22 July. Of course, rather than being given the job of leading the investigation into Anders Behring Breivik, units like the organised crime unit of the Oslo police should themselves be approached as a serious problem. Everyone knows that Anders Behring Breivik is a dangerous threat to Norwegian democracy. A far greater but underestimated threat against Norway as a liberal rule-of-law society are the government-sponsored thugs in the organised crime unit who commit human rights crimes in the name of the rechtsstaat with impunity.

It is also part of the story that one and a half year later, it seems Oslo police did not learn their lesson from the affair. Norwegian extra-territorial police involvement continued on Dutch soil after the 22 July bombs, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. Throughout 2011, Oslo police kept trying to manipulate and interfere with the e-mail correspondence of the historian and people he was in touch with on a professional basis. When a wave of rapes hit Oslo in autumn 2011 and the resource problems of the Oslo police once more became very pronounced, the Oslo police opted to stay involved in their expensive overseas harassment operation. When the historian finally left the Netherlands in July 2012 after months of unbearable sleep deprivation verging on physical torture, Norwegian and other European police officers followed after him to 3 different countries (including Taiwan, with which neither Norway nor the Netherlands has diplomatic relations). They continue to mistreat him overseas until this day.

Police work is first and foremost about making priorities. There is an infinite universe of societal problems which may or may not deserve police attention. In doing their work, one of the key tasks of the police is to differentiate between, on the one hand, things like photography, and, on the other hand, things like bombs.

Said differently, this case really is the exam of policing 101. You have limited resources.

You have person A, who takes perfectly legal pictures for an academic project, and who never bothers anyone for more than a few seconds of their life. You have person B, who prepares to bomb and shoot as many innocent civilians as possible, preferably with some high-ranking politicians included for good measure.

The Oslo police chose to go after person A with a maximum of resources and ignored person B. That’s a fail.

August 13, 2012

[Also available in Norwegian/norsk tekst her: https://policestalking.wordpress.com /2012/08/13/etterretningssvikt-og-inkompetanse-i-politiet-forut-for-22-juli/] It should be said at the outset that the government-appointed but theoretically “independent� commission looking into the 22 July atrocities in Norway last year in many ways has performed better than expected. Their report, published today, is not a whitewash as far as government agency responsibilities for mistakes during the run-up to the 22 July attacks and the aftermath are concerned. Even some friends of the Labour-led government in leading positions in police and intelligence apparatus face a degree of criticism for their actions, at least implicitly.

Most of the chapters in the report relate to split-second decisions on 22 July 2011 and the state of preparedness of various government agencies with respect to emergency and disaster management. While instances of human error are important to clarify, they are of limited significance to the bigger question of whether the attack could have been prevented in the first place. That question, in turn, is addressed in the report mainly in chapter 16,

dealing with the secret service of the Norwegian police (PST).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect in this regard is the marked contrast between today’s independent report and the internal report of the PST published earlier this year – which generally exonerated the police with respect to the question of whether it could have detected the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik or not. Whereas the independent report is diplomatic in its language in the concluding chapter, the way it coolly describes the actions of the PST in dealing with tipoffs about Breivik’s purchases of chemicals from Poland in practice amounts to a rather scathing criticism.

What today’s report clarifies is that for months, the tipoff about Breivik in December 2010 was left to languish in a bureaucratic vacuum as secret service officials were unable to agree whose jurisdiction it belonged to. When the turf war finally ended in April 2011, the official who was handed the Breivik-related report from the customs authorities relating to purchases of chemicals lackadaisically declared it was time to go on holiday. By the time the bombs exploded on 22 July, he had yet to look at the report in greater detail.

Unlike the internal PST report, which tried to use counterfactual methods to suggest that even if Breivik had been followed up from the first tipoff in December 2010 he wouldn’t have been detected, the independent report goes far in arguing that by simply following the guidelines from the Global Shield project which produced the tipoff, PST could have identified Breivik as suspicious. Without spelling it out completely, the report hints at a secret service that is narrow-minded and unable to see the big picture.

While the independent commission should be commended for looking at the performance of the PST from a truly fresh perspective, the report at the same time leaves out a very big elephant, or rather mammoth, in its assessment of responsibilities and guilt in the sprawling house that is the Norwegian police. There is hardly any mention of the role of the big organised crime unit of the Oslo police – a shadowy entity that specialises in so-called “untraditional” police methods.

This omission is surprising, because the organised crime unit of the Oslo police is relevant to the work of the PST in two ways. Firstly, the organised crime unit is supposed to do intelligence work on political extremism on its own. Strangely, the independent commission report confirms the existence of an political extremism intelligence branch within the organised crime unit of the Oslo police in chapter 16, but without asking why it never took any interest in Anders Behring Breivik! Breivik, who lived in Oslo for most of 2010 and 2011, had in 2010 referred to former prime minister Gro Brundtland as “murderer of the nation” in an open internet discussion forum, which in itself should make alarm clocks go off in a fine-tuned intelligence branch.

Secondly, the PST relies on the organised crime unit of the Oslo police for some of its undercover work. To appreciate just how intertwined the PST and the Oslo police are, consider this Wikileaks cable from November 2009 concerning US concerns about Norway’s ability to effectively keep tabs on suspected Al-Qaida cells. In a report that encapsulates the problem, US officers describe how in the midst of an on-going operation against suspected al-Qaida surveillance is discontinued for 2 weeks because a unit involved from the Oslo police, almost certainly the organised crime unit, is pulled away from the project to work on a Serbian crime case instead. In plain English, the US assessment of the affair is that the Norwegian police is simply not up to it in terms of counter-terrorism policing.

During the spring of 2011, rather than assisting PST with tipoffs or offering undercover capacity that perhaps could have prompted a more proactive approach to the December 2010 tipoffs, the organised crime unit was busy harassing an academic and photographer abroad in a spending spree where Norwegian taxpayer money was wasted on business class air tickets, luxury hotels and expensive rental cars. It is fair to say that exactly like the situation in 2009 exposed by Wikileaks, the narrow priorities of the organised crime unit related to perceived problems at the very local level in the streets of Oslo had interfered

with its ability to offer PST maximum support.

This underlying, structural problem in Norway’s national security architecture is not addressed in the commission report today. Nor does the commission make what would have been a very logical recommendation: To strip the hapless, myopic and sometimes incompetent Oslo police of intelligence tasks of national significance for which they are simply not intellectually and analytically equipped, and instead put those tasks in the hands of truly national units that are capable of rising above the narrow priorities of big-city policing of Oslo and focus on issues and problems that truly matter to Norway’s national security. The current dualism of the tasks of the Oslo police, part big-city policing, part national security tasks, does not work and probably cannot work. Of course, such a bold course would effectively imply criticism of the dangerous kind – a damning verdict on the 10 years in office of Norway’s first director of police, Ingelin Killengreen, who is well connected with the Labour party. It could have implied that the Labour party brought the 22 July disaster on itself by letting Killengreen build a police force structurally unfit for the challenges posed by modern terrorism. Maybe that would have been too much, even for an independent commission.

August 13, 2012

Med utførlig kritikk av de fleste involverte etater fremstår 22. juli-kommisjonens rapport på mange måter som grundigere, modigere og mer frittalende enn hva mange hadde forventet.

Mange av kapitlene i rapporten angår beslutninger som ble tatt i kritiske minutter og sekunder den 22. juli. Fra et langsiktig preventivt perspektiv er derimot kanskje det mest interessante avsnittet kapittel 16, som reiser spørsmålet om PST kunne ha fattet mistanke til Anders Behring Breivik i månedene forut for 22. juli. I den forbindelse er det særlig interessant å se den markante forskjellen mellom hvordan PSTs interne rapport behandlet denne problemstillingen tidligere i år og det som nå legges frem i kommisjonens rapport.

Read the rest of this entry »

The independent commission report on government failures related to the 22 July terror attacks in Norway turned out to be more outspoken and thorough than many had expected.

Alas, the problem is that one of the main targets of criticism in the report, the Norwegian police, shows every sign of perpetuating its state of denial even several days after the hard facts were published. So far, the director of the police, Øystein Mæland, keeps coming back to a sentence that seems to be something of a mantra for him, namely that everyone in the Norwegian police “did their best” on 22 July. And that, apparently, is considered sufficient to dismiss any suggestion that he and other leading figures in the Norwegian police should start looking for new jobs.

This remarkably naïve stance by the director of the police is worrying for several reasons.

Above all, it indicates a failure on the part of Mæland to realise that much of the incompetence of the police in the 22 July case relates to structural problems rather than to split-second decisions on the day of the disaster (when indeed many foot soldiers may have done ”their best” under adverse circumstances). Structural problems go deeper and further back in time, which is why it would be such a tragic end to this saga if the casualties during the organisational clean-up were limited to the local police chief of Northern Buskerud (where the Utøya atrocity took place and where most of the nuts and bolts problems arose on the day of the attacks).

Far more important than the actions taken on the day of the attacks is the role of the former director of police, Ingelin Killengreen, who served as Norway’s first police directorate head during eleven years from 2000 until 1 April 2011. During that period, she basically designed a national police system completely unfit to detect and deal with a case of extreme right-wing terrorism. Just 4 months before the 22 July attacks, Killengreen left the police directorate for a top job at the ministry of renewal, administration and church affairs. The 22 July independent report should form a very suitable occasion for permanently removing her from high public office – action that would in fact be considered long overdue in the eyes of many. Killengreen’s incompetence was on prominent display as early as in 1996 when she was police chief in Oslo and infamously allowed a Chinese visiting delegation to essentially decide the rules for how to handle peaceful demonstrators protesting the visit.

As for Mæland himself, he may well escape censure for his actions on the day of the attack

given the fact that he had barely taken up his position in the police directorate when all hell broke loose. However, his narrow-minded approach in defending the actions of the police even in the face of massive evidence of widespread incompetence is now in itself becoming a liability for the police. What MĂŚland has done in terms of unhelpful cover-up attempts during the year that has passed since 22 July 2011 increasingly constitutes an independent rationale for getting rid of him as well alongside Killengreen. Add to that the fact that MĂŚland remains nominally responsible for a scandal that is even bigger than what the 22 July commission revealed: The fact that the Oslo police, who is supposed to support the secret service with Oslo-related surveillance and undercover activity, was unable to offer much assistance during the months leading up to the 22 July attacks because several leading officers were busy travelling the world in an illegal and extrajudicial punishment operation targeting a chronically ill academic and photographer. The operation still goes on overseas today.

Only by juxtaposing the paralysis of the Norwegian secret services with the unsupervised and often criminal antics of the organised crime unit of the Oslo police, is it possible to appreciate the real depth of structural crisis in the Norwegian police today. In a tragicomic reflection of this case, it seems the Norwegian secret services were so hamstrung after the Lund commission had dealt with its Cold War surveillance techniques in 1996 that by late 2010 they hardly dared take note of a terror suspect in fear of violating privacy and due process requirements. Conversely, the organised crime unit of the Oslo police has been given carte blanche by Killengreen and Labour politicians to break every law in their extra-legal harassment of perceived enemies in and around Oslo, often to the point where they get so involved in their illegal activities that they are unable to offer the secret services the assistance they are supposed to provide. Jail rather than dismissals is probably the solution here: Instead of sacking operational staff who at least tried to do their job in a legal way on 22 July, prosecuting officers in the organised crime unit who systematically engage in human rights violations and thereby destroy the work of honest police officers may be the best way to rectify problems in the Norwegian police that came to the fore on 22 July. Until these people are safely behind bars, they will continue to constitute a grave threat to the rule of law and democracy in Norway.

Unfortunately, comments yesterday by Johnny Nauste, a leading police union figure, encapsulate the haplessness of the Norwegian police in dealing with the latest flurry of criticism. In Nauste’s view, apparently the current police director should not be dismissed because he had just been on the jobs for a few weeks, whereas the former director should not be dismissed because she was not on the job the day of the attacks!

Apart from the atrocities of 22 July themselves, the most disturbing aspect of Norway’s terror attacks last year was the subsequent attempt by so-called psychiatric experts to declare the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik legally insane. Of course, the question of insanity must ultimately be decided by professionals, but even laymen can say something about the arguments that have been used to support the diagnosis of insanity so far: They are not impressive.

In fact, many of the arguments used to support the diagnosis of Breivik as a paranoid schizophrenic can be dismissed simply with a little common sense and some political science of the most basic kind.

First, there is the political aspect. Breivik propagates a grand conspiracy theory about how Western governments supposedly collaborate with Muslims in a secret plot to Islamize Europe. This thesis is easy to refute empirically (basically, there is no empirical evidence of specific links between Islamist politicians and Western governments supporting them in this way), but it does not mean large number of right-wing politicians in Europe don’t believe in it. There are tens and thousands of them and they are not all legally insane. For example, with respect to Breivik’s commentary on the Middle East it is possible to conclude he is off the mark but probably not more off the mark than an average US politician.

Second, there is a wide array of supposed “symptoms” quoted by psychiatrists in defence of their insanity diagnosis (a good tabulation with some quotations in Norwegian is given

by Aftenposten here; the reports themselves are here).

1. Breivik moved home to live with his mother in Oslo’s West End for a period. Right.

The psychiatrists would be surprised to learn how many Norwegian twenty-somethings do exactly the same in order to save money. In the expensive Oslo rental market, in particular, this is not an altogether uncommon survival strategy.

2. Breivik wore a face mask when his mother was ill. “Paranoia!” scream the psychiatrists.

Do they know how common this practice is in Asia, even outside the flu season? Face masks are a perfectly rational response to elevated risk of disease transmission, such as when a family member is sick. Many doctors say it is more effective than ritualistic hand washing. Hell, even members of the sacrosanct Norwegian national cross-country ski team

have confessed to reducing their social activity during flu season if they are preparing for a competition. Breivik’s face mask has to do with the diffusion of reasonable ideas about health from Asia to Europe following years with SARS and swine flu scares; it has nothing to do with insanity.

3. Breivik “does not stay on topic” during interviews. Did anyone watch the press conference of the Norwegian minister of justice after the director of police was recently forced out due to revelations about gross police failure in the 22 July independent commission report?

4. Breivik was overcautious with respect to plainclothes police. Perfectly rational behaviour if you are planning mass murder.

5. Perhaps the most tragicomic piece of “evidence” presented by the psychiatrists is Breivik’s language. “He overuses creative compounds”, say the psychiatrists.

Neologisms! OK, so that can signify meaningless words coined by a psychotic. But hold your horses. In Norwegian, new compound words appear all the time, sometimes with only tenuous relationship to empirical realities. A decade or so ago, an ad campaign for a margarine spread highlighted its “spreadability” by using the Norwegian word smørevillig – literally “willing to be spread”, as if the fat could think and act. Academics invent new words all the time. Some survive, others disappear again. Does coining a term like ethnofederalism in the context of federalism in ethnically divided societies make one legally insane?

To be fair, a second team of psychiatrists came up with what seemed a far more reasonable assessment: Breivik is a narcissist. This is perhaps not the most fortunate diagnosis on the planet, but clinically proven narcissists are still fit to stand trial and receive punishment according to standard criminal procedure in Norway. Sadly, though, in the name of “the benefit of the doubt”, prosecutors in the Breivik case opted to hang on to the arguments of the first pair of psychiatrists as basis for doubting his legal sanity.

Interestingly, both the accused and families of the victims alike seem to disapprove of the idea of Breivik being declared insane. It would certainly look bad if Norway adopted the Israeli approach of almost invariably declaring terrorists from the majority population as “insane”, reserving reserve the term “terrorists” for ethnic minorities.

The only thing proven by the contribution of the lead psychiatrists in the Breivik case so is their own insularity, narrow-mindedness and ignorance of wider trends in European politics and society. This in itself is perhaps not sufficiently shocking to merit a diagnosis for them, but a gentle suggestion to these “experts” about taking some time off from work

and travel outside Norway might be worthwhile. As for the wider institutional implications, together with other worrying aspects of Norwegian law enforcement practices such as the exaggerated use of pre-trial detention and other extra-judicial punishment such as police stalking, the ease with which psychiatrists have used shoddy analysis to influence the Breivik trial serves as an indicator that all is not well in the Norwegian judicial system. Sadly, though, it seems many of these dubious practices will get renewed life when the verdict in the Breivik case falls on Friday.

August 28, 2012

Following the surprisingly frank and thorough independent commission report on Norway’s 22 July terror attacks and the almost catharsis-like performance of the Oslo district court which last week bravely ignored dubious psychiatric assessments and instead sentenced Anders Behring Breivik as a legally sane right wing terrorist, there was a degree of expectation related to the appearances before the Norwegian parliament today of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Minister of Justice Grete Faremo.

Alas, the performances of the two were as pathetic as many observers had feared. Much of Stoltenberg’s speech amounted to a schoolboy’s reiteration of a report with which every adult Norwegian by now is broadly familiar. Some fancy jargon was thrown in for good measure, including the supposed emergence of a common “narrative” on the attacks and a “compass” for the way forward. There were platitudes regarding more “openness” and “enhanced visibility” in government. And above all, there were promises about another string of reports, meetings and decisions to be made at distant points in the future – in some cases not until 2013.

Unfortunately, one of the few specific decisions cited by Stoltenberg today is also likely to prove a failure. A new centralised police emergency unit will from now on be physically located at Alnabru, within the jurisdiction (and administrative purview) of the Oslo police district. Effectively, this means giving one of the most incompetent police organisations in Northern Europe continued responsibility for important matters that should have been dealt with by a professional, national elite unit instead. Prior to the 22 July attacks, the Oslo police were heavily involved in illegalities that deflected attention from Anders Behring Breivik and may have played a role in creating the scandalous state of

unpreparedness that came to the fore on the day of the attacks.

A brave decision by Stoltenberg would have been to strip the discredited Oslo police of any tasks of national significance. This, however, may well be to ask too much. The problem is that some of the most dysfunctional parts of the Oslo police – including most prominently the large and scandalised organised crime unit – are headed by people who enjoy the personal protection of Labour appointees in the directorate of police and indeed in the government itself. Quite in line with this, Stoltenberg today resorted to stop-gap measures that essentially perpetuate legacies of unprofessionalism instead of challenging them.

In this way, PM Stoltenberg is unable to provide the same kind of objective distance that characterised the 22 July independent commission report and the ruling by Oslo district court against Anders Behring Breivik. Through personal and union ties, the Norwegian Labour party is simply too deeply involved in the dysfunctional Norwegian police to be able to offer a substantial corrective. To the Labour party, large segments of the Oslo police are unassailable sacred cows – people that cannot be touched for political reasons and that are subject to no oversight simply because of the personal protection they enjoy among Labour loyalists in high places.

Comments by Minister of Justice Faremo towards the end of her speech today encapsulate the hypocrisy of the Norwegian Labour party. She recommended increased cooperation between Norwegian police and foreign police services, but lamented the fact that this might involve countries not sharing “Norway’s rule of law standards”! Apparently oblivious to the fact that cronies of her own government in the Oslo police have played a leading role in exporting illegal harassment techniques and FBI-strength “enhanced methods” to countries like Qatar and Jordan, Faremo today once more opted to perpetuate myths about a functional Norwegian law enforcement system instead of confronting those myths head on when needed.

In most parliamentary systems, the Stoltenberg government would have been considered a lame duck by now. However, Norway’s elections follow a strict four-year cycle irrespective of cabinet crises, and the current opposition know they have everything to gain from letting Stoltenberg soldier on trying to fix problems he cannot fix. Meanwhile, Norwegian citizens may have to wait another year before a new prime minister with the courage to clean up the rotten Norwegian police can finally emerge.

In most democratic countries, pre-trial detention is recognised as a fundamental breach of the presumption of innocence and therefore something that should be avoided as much as possible.

Given its generally good human rights record, Norway has got a surprisingly large amount of bad press for its overuse of pre-trial detention. What has received less attention, though, is that the organised crime unit of the Oslo police deliberately resorts to pre-trial detention in many cases where prosecution is not necessarily even the end goal. For example, for years, the organised crime unit has practised mass arrests of entire families when only one member of the family is suspected of specific criminal wrongdoing. Officers of the organised crime unit have publicly said the aim of this is to terrify and to “show that association with these people is a risk sport”. This tendency is in line with a broader pattern of systematic violations of the presumption of innocence by the organised crime unit.

This week, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet published new comments by officers within the organised crime unit that once more highlighted how they see themselves as being far above the judicial system and its limitations. In the context of an upsurge of ethnic gang-related violence in Oslo, an officer called Rune Swahn revealed that one of the priorities of the unit right now is to produce as many criminal cases against gang members as possible, “preferably of the kind that leads to pre-trial detentions so that these people are taken out of circulation”. Of course, pre-trial detentions are by their very nature highly arbitrary. People may come into custody over the weekend and when they finally are allowed to appear before a court the next week, the threshold for keeping people in continued (pre-trial) detention is very low.

Swahn goes on to detail the undercover work of his subunit – known as Spesielle Operasjoner, which may sound like “special operations” but which in Norwegian translates as “peculiar operations”. That’s a fitting name. Swahn brags about how the police know where the gang members are at any time, who their girlfriends are, where they go on holiday, etc. He goes on to say, “we can also use unconventional methods”, without providing any specifics. The unconventional methods of the organised crime unit are however well known: They consist of stalking, harassment and outright threats against people who are disliked by the police but who cannot be prosecuted for a lack of judicial basis.

The latest information from Dagbladet only serves to underline the image of the organised crime unit of the Oslo police as an affront to the concept of rule of law in Norway. A cancerous tumour within the Norwegian law enforcement system, it needs to be excised with solid margin before the police state tendencies it represents will gain ground and become difficult to reverse.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

September 3, 2012

Today is the first day on the job for Hans Sverre Sjøvold, the new chief of the Oslo police.

The Oslo police are currently struggling to cope with a barrage of criticism relating to their collective failure before, under and after the 22 July terror attacks. Despite this, it has recently emerged that Sjøvold’s predecessor, Anstein Gjengedal, was actually awarded a considerable bonus for the “results” he presided over in 2011. Those “results” included total neglect of the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik until he perpetrated his lethal attack on 22 July 2011, as well as spending millions of Norwegian kroner on harassing an innocent foreign national abroad in 10 different countries.

Sjøvold now assumes responsibility of a renegade department within the Oslo police known as the organised crime unit, which commits human rights crimes with impunity at home and abroad, and is currently involved in a multi-national operation in the Asia-Pacific region which features extensive use of physical torture. This lawless band

constitutes one of the biggest threats against the rule of law and democracy in Norway, but has been given cover to operate with impunity under the tenure of the former director of the Norwegian police, Ingelin Killengreen.

It is not only the organised crime unit that needs to be taken care of in the Oslo police, even if this may be the most pressing concern right now. Among other problems, the highly unprofessional public relations department also seems in need of some urgent attention. Its Twitter antics have already raised eyebrows among many, and not only for the sloppy and idiosyncratic language. 30 August came a new low when the police tweeted the following:

“Stk.”, short for stykk, is a classifier in the Norwegian language, and is used roughly in the same way as “pieces” in English. The resultant sentence, whilst difficult to translate to English, would run something like this: “Police received a call about 10 Nigerian women fighting in King’s Street. When police arrived, they were running around in all directions.

2 pieces [Nigerian women] were taken into custody”.

Whether one reads this kind of language as a failed attempt at being funny or just plain racism, this is simply not the way a responsible law enforcement agency should make light of and/or dehumanise people it takes into custody. With the massive authority the police commands, stigmatising language of this nature should be inexcusable.

Alas, whether Sjøvold will fix the many problems in the Oslo police is far from certain.

After years at the Norwegian police academy and at the police section of the ministry of justice, Sjøvold is himself considered a crony of Killengreen. Even deeply sympathetic observers like Tore Bjørgo of the Norwegian police academy recently expressed the view that the personal ties of Sjøvold to the previous director of police may turn into a liability.

Maybe the bigger question today is whether the new, acting police director, Odd Reidar Humlegård, will continue beyond 2012 or make room for someone who is more independent of the Killengreen legacy.

Do you wonder why some of the worst excesses of Dutch police have taken place in the Zuid Holland Zuid police district?

Perhaps one explanation relates to the ideology of the police chief of the region, Frank Paauw. Paauw, who is also the head of the Rotterdam-Rijnmond region, is one of the most vocal and blunt proponents of a police state philosophy within the ranks of the Dutch police. Through a series of remarkable media statements, he has propagated a vision of a totalitarian style of policing that would take the Netherlands ever further in the direction of an authoritarian society. Whereas some of Paauw’s statements have generated controversy, it is remarkable how often the Dutch judiciary has agreed with his extremist views.

Maybe a recent police brutality incident in Rotterdam can serve as a good point of departure for understanding Mr. Paauw’s views on the relationship between police and citizen. The episode, which is but one of a myriad of police brutality cases in the rough downtown area of Rotterdam, happened to get filmed on a cell phone and thereby generated a certain media interest.

The published video shows an East European man who is clearly under influence of drugs or alcohol. At the beginning of the film, he is literally holding on to the railings with two police officers standing a few metres away. (He has already been pepper sprayed once.) For the duration of the first 7 seconds of the video it is perfectly clear that the man is concentrating his efforts on standing on his two feet, and is not particularly successful at that. There is no sign of violence on his part whatsoever. One of the two police officers then approaches him and suddenly kicks him twice; this brings him to the ground. For the first 30 seconds of the video, the second police officer is just watching. Only after 1 minute do the officers proceed to put handcuffs on the man although he had clearly been subjugated from the very beginning.

In short, this seems like a very obvious case of excessive violence by the police.

Nonetheless, shortly after the incident, the Dutch judiciary proclaimed the violence used by the police to be “proportional”. They claimed there had been violence in the seconds before the video was shot (at least one eye witness denied this), and that an attempt to use pepper spray had been ineffectual.

Of course, the elephant in the room here is the second police officer. If the delinquent was so dangerous, why did he look on passively for a full 30 seconds before assisting his colleague? If the two had manhandled him, surely it would have been easier to arrest him in a reasonably humane way. That, after all, is why they’re always two, is it not?

Enter Frank Paauw, the Rotterdam police chief. Not only did he support his subordinate in this case. He even expressed “irritation” at the press uproar the incident generated!

Paauw’s ideas about the Dutch police being way above the law should not come as a big surprise. He has previously gone on record suggesting that the DNA of all Dutch citizens should be collected for use in criminal investigations. Privacy concerns, he maintained, could not override the priorities of the police. Subsequent to the comments, one of his aides confirmed that it was neither a joke nor a misquote.

When Paauw became chief of the Rotterdam police on 1 October 2010 he made a much-cited speech which perhaps can explain where he comes from, ideologically. In it, he declared that “the police is not your best friend”. Fair enough. But he then went on to add, “the police must be the boss on the streets. That involves things you would not do to your best friend”. That sounds more like a threat.

Neither the subjugation of peaceful delinquent by kicking them to ground nor police stalking is defined as a legal method by the Dutch police law. Perhaps the “boss on the street” maxim, rather than the law, is what primarily governs Paauw’s policies? In his two

districts, the police have also been implicated in crimes against humanity (police-led recruitment of children to serve as bullies) as well as outright physical torture (remote taser-like devices used against enemies of the police).

In a broader Dutch perspective, the practices of the police in the Rotterdam and Zuid Holland Zuid districts may stand out somewhat for their brutality, but they are by no means unique. Time and again, Dutch cops get caught on videos while they are beating up peaceful citizens for no good reason. They don’t seem to care, and are almost universally exonerated by the judiciary. No independent police complaint authority exists in the Netherlands.

In 2013 Rotterdam-Rijnmond and Zuid Holland Zuid will unite as one police district in the revamped Dutch police system and Paauw is slated to rule both jurisdictions as a single unit. It will be a big charge for a man with a big police state agenda.

September 19, 2012

I sometimes wonder why it took me so long to write in the first person about police stalking.

I wanted to exhaust every other possibility first. To make sure that there was no other conceivable road back to the life I once lived. I had been happy as an historian based in Oslo in Norway, working on Iraq and its transition to democracy and the rule of law.

Back in early 2011, when the Oslo police began giving me unwanted attention due to my street photography, I reacted with shock and fear. At the time, my own jurisprudence regarding photography was unrefined and mainly based on induction and analogy: If a Japanese tourist could take mobile camera photos, then so could I. When a fleet of uniformed and unmarked police cars suddenly began chasing me around the streets of Oslo in February 2011 in a so-called police stalking operation (aka “conspicuous surveillance�), I panicked and got worried I might have overlooked some kind of newly introduced regulation specifically relating to the use of mobile cameras. The harassment, I suspected, could be intended as warm-up before questioning and prosecution.

But when the police persecution continued around the clock for several weeks – escalating to regular sleep disturbance as plainclothes police deliberately woke me up several times every night – I changed my interpretation. I concluded that the more they harassed me, the less they could prosecute me. I was also increasingly convinced that my photography, mostly snapshots taken in broad daylight on the way to and from work and intended for a future sociological project on street fashion, was perfectly legal. Since health issues limit my ability to travel to Iraq, I have always explored various asides as potential alternative research areas for the future.

My next idea was to offer the police some kind of satisfying “result”. In retrospect, this looks stupid and defensive, but back then it seemed to me that I was in a conflict with the police where prosecution was impossible but where they were bent on punishing me extrajudicially anyway. Instead of starting an uphill court struggle or accepting more harassment, I decided I would simply leave the country and continue to do my Iraq work from elsewhere. Norway is not exactly the centre of the universe with respect to Middle East studies. If the Oslo police thought my photography was a problem they could celebrate their little triumph, and that would be the end of the matter.

In late March 2011, I travelled to London with the intention of finding a flat. When Norwegian police came after me and managed to get police in London to replicate the 24/7 harassment protocol they had started in Oslo, I panicked again. The use of resources and manpower seemed insane compared to the trivial nature of my supposed “crime”. Had the Kafkaesque response perhaps been triggered by some kind of translation problem?

Thinking that a huge, federal country would be more difficult to navigate for a Norwegian police team on a profoundly illegal mission, I decided to fly to the United States. In the past, the US government had shown considerable interest in my Iraq research, to the point where they had paid me to fly over from Oslo to DC to give lectures and presentations on political and constitutional issues several times every year since 2005. Why couldn’t I work for them instead? If they paid me a salary instead of all the air tickets, the difference wouldn’t be that big.

The Norwegians came after me to the United States as well. Easily recognisable officers of the organised crime unit within the Oslo police even followed me into research libraries where they deliberately sat next to me and made noise in order to disturb my work on Iraq.

Instead of working into the small hours with Iraq analyses in the way I had used to, I now had to stay focused just on trying to get some hours of sleep. With a whole team of police officers paid by the Norwegian government for the sole purpose of harassing me 24/7, the odds were stacked against me.

With all the police around, I was reluctant to make the first move towards the US government. I met friends at the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, and considered my options for reaching out to someone high up to explain my predicament.

But even meetings I had at these institutions had evidently been infiltrated by the FBI on the request of the Norwegians. When I got invited to a Middle East event in Qatar in May I decided to go there first instead, hoping that the harassment would stop simply due to the complications of geography and culture. This, in turn, would enable me to safely reach out to people in Washington through a US diplomatic mission. To have Norwegian police in Qatar would be absurd, I thought.

When the same Norwegian police officers came after me to Qatar anyway, I decided to travel to one more Middle Eastern country before contacting a US embassy. I flew to Jordan and on 17 May 2011 offered my services to someone who said he was a CIA station officer at the US embassy in Amman. I basically told him I would be happy to work for the US government anywhere in the world on Iraq or Middle East related subjects as long as they could bring the illegal police harassment to an end. This was not entirely implausible: I am the only academic to have appeared on the prestigious annual Iraq conference of the Office of Iraq Analysis within the CIA five years in a row between 2006 and 2010. The US government has a chronic shortage of people who can read Arabic, and has even fewer who can navigate issues like Iraqi federalism, Shiite internationalism and Iraqi constitutional issues using primary Arabic materials, advanced searches and Deep Web exploration. The areas that I have expertise in are among the core drivers that decide global oil prices and developments in Islamic radicalism; not even a superpower can afford to ignore them.

Nothing came out of my initiative in Jordan. Until this day I am not convinced that the person I met in Amman was really CIA. There were FBI officers travelling with the Norwegians to Qatar, so it is quite possible that they were in Amman too. I can’t claim it was an attempted sting operation (at times they seemed more interested in asking about the reason for my conflict with the Oslo police than about Iraq), but I am pretty sure it wasn’t the real thing.

By the time I came to the Netherlands in June 2011, the idea of going public with the whole affair began to mature. But blogging about my story was not the number one option. First, I thought that by simply staying over a long period in the Netherlands, Norwegian police would find it even more difficult to justify their continued involvement in the expensive and irrational harassment operation. Surely the Dutch police, in turn, would lose interest and shelve the increasingly scandalous project. Remember that the police stalking went on day and night. The authorities were wasting the money of taxpayers in both Norway and the Netherlands, and even criminalised some of them by luring them

into cooperating with the illegal operation against me.

However, the nightmare continued in the Netherlands, with an increasingly heavy health toll for me. I suffer from a chronic inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis) and due to severe constipation during the worst sleep deprivation episodes in Norway in February 2011 I developed gastro-intestinal injuries which Dutch surgeons since have told me have become chronic. In November 2011, I sent an e-mail to several members of the Norwegian cabinet outlining my predicament in considerable detail and made it clear that my only desire was to live undisturbed somewhere and quietly continue my Iraq research.

No response materialised. The Norwegian Labour party has a track record of supporting and promoting untraditional police methods, including police stalking.

In November 2011, I finally tried to enter into dialogue with the Oslo police through a Norwegian lawyer. The police failed to recognise the harassment operation, but did issue a letter to the effect that they had no criminal case against me. That gesture was however of limited value since the police kept instigating people in Norway to send me e-mail messages calculated to cause intimidation. Similarly, in the Netherlands, the stalkers were deliberately parading symbols associated with Norway all the time, including the Norwegian flag. I concluded that if I returned home, the harassment would most likely continue unabated and that it would be better to stay in the Netherlands. My hope was that by focusing on my Iraq research, I could convince the government there I was doing more good than harm.

However, even as I was covering the critical period of transition after the US withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011, the Dutch government kept sabotaging my Iraq research with daily and nightly disturbances. Police stalking is a well known method among Dutch police.

By April 2012, I had a satisfactory overview of the legal aspects of the case: Whereas what I had done in terms of street photography was perfectly legal (my photos were not even close to any of the two main legal red lines, i.e. nudity and/or stalking), almost every step the Norwegian police had taken was illegal and punishable with a maximum of 15 years under article 117a of the Norwegian penal code (psychological torture). I had been able to identify a handful of the most savage ringleaders in the Oslo police and some of the Dutch by full name and rank. Armed with this information, I submitted a formal complaint to the Norway’s independent police commission (Spesialenheten).

My complaint produced no immediate result. Having exhausted most other channels to no avail, by June blogging finally seemed a sensible alternative. But I decided I would do one more attempt to generate what I needed most: Witnesses willing to publicly confirm my

unusual story. By that time I could name around 200 people, mostly in Norway and the Netherlands, who had cooperated criminally with the police against me. Some were even academics and people I formerly considered friends. However, only with the support of investigative journalists was it realistic that anyone would come forward and confirm the story.

I thought a third-person version of my case, timed to coincide with the release of the independent commission report on Norway’s 22 July 2011 terror attacks, might generate some media interest in Norway due to the close links between the two cases. Whereas the Oslo police had spent much of their undercover capacity on trailing me across the globe during the critical months before 22 July 2011, they had paid no attention whatsoever to the right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik (despite the existence of tipoffs relating to him). The sharp contrast between the vast resources spent on illegalities against me and the failure to even follow up on Breivik is clearly the stuff of a major scandal. Accordingly, one week before the release of the official Norwegian 22 July report, I published my own version (still in the third person), outlining how the failed priorities of the Oslo police and their waste of taxpayer money had prevented them from tracking down Breivik prior to 22 July.

So far, the response to my blogging about police stalking has been underwhelming compared with what I experienced with writing on Iraq. It is depressingly more difficult to find readers who are interested in human rights abuse in Norway than in Iraq! The most specific result so far is that my employer, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, has intensified its effort to sack me for speaking out against torture by Norwegian police.

Administratively, the institute is within the sphere of the ministry of education/knowledge.

Meanwhile the ministry of justice appears to continue to finance the participation of personnel and resources of the Oslo police in the daily harassment operations which continue where I now am in the Asia-Pacific region.

Shifting to the first person should hopefully help address some credibility issues in my story. To anyone who may have doubt about the veracity of what I am describing, try to see this whole situation from my point of view: I was a successful Iraq analyst who got invited to conferences around the globe. 3,500 people subscribed to my website newsletters. I had a well-paid government job in an oil-rich country with one of the highest standards of living on the planet. What would be the rationality of suddenly complaining about Norwegian police persecution if there was no substance whatsoever to my story?

Why would I put all my credibility and livelihood on the line with serious allegations if it was all a concoction?

I hope more people will now be able to understand that I cannot possibly write as much on

constitutional and rule of law issues in Iraq as I used to. To lecture the Iraqis on democracy when I am being harassed extra-judicially and even tortured by my own so-called democratic government would amount to hypocrisy. Some of my most fundamental human rights under the UN and EU charters have been taken away from me by the Norwegian and Dutch governments. Each and every day for more than one and a half year these so-called democratic governments have paid officials overtime for the single purpose of making noise and wake me up at night. When I experience such conditions at home, how can I criticize conditions in Iraq with a straight face?

The reason that I am now a staunch critic of the police in Norway and the Netherlands is simply that they transformed me into this role. They gave me no other choice. I had signalled my willingness to move and settle down in a banana republic and quietly remain focused on Iraq if they would only stop mistreating me. But they cannot stop. The project is just too enticing in terms of the luxury hotel stays and the air miles earned by the police officers that take part in the “international cooperation effort” against me. Outside the police, no bureaucrat, politician or citizen collaborator has the courage to blow the whistle. The governments of Norway and the Netherlands don’t seem to give a damn about the fact that my Iraq work is still being read on a daily basis by analysts in NATO ally countries like the United States.

That’s why henceforth I shall not be debating the authoritarianism of Iraqi PM Maliki but instead pay attention to Norwegian PM Stoltenberg and his polices. That’s why I shall give up my research on Iraqi political parties and instead do my best to follow in the footsteps of the eminent Norwegian historian Jens Arup Seip, who in a path-breaking lecture in 1963 addressed what he saw as the “Stalinism” of the Norwegian Labour party. And that is the reason why I shall be revealing torture and other illegal methods used by the organised crimes unit of the Oslo police, and how political cover from certain pro-Labour figures in high places in the Norwegian government enables the Oslo police to engage in one of the most totalitarian police operations seen in peacetime Europe. Conversely, the transgressions of the Iraqi secret police and the interior ministry special forces I shall henceforth leave for others to debate. For sure, I will still try to keep track of Iraq with one eye and publish the occasional Iraq article, but the main focus of my research is now Norwegian police criminality. I have no other choice.

I hope readers with a declared interest in human rights will remain interested also when the focus moves to Western democracies. After all, to have a narrow regional focus on a subject like universal human rights can easily become something of a contradiction. In the end, only those who dare to stand up against human rights abuse at home will have true credibility when they address such issues in distant foreign countries.

For more background, see the about page.

September 26, 2012

Some aspects of police stalking conceptually belong to the same class of mistreatment as Chinese water torture. In Chinese water torture, the pain of each little water drop falling on the body of the immobilised victim (usually on the forehead) is probably so small that any doctor would dismiss it as insignificant. And yet the total effect of those water drops is sufficiently strong that the method has been used for centuries as punishment and for interrogation purposes.

Can this be torture?

Before Chinese water torture was generally known, victims who claimed to have suffered unbearable pain after having experienced light water drops falling on their forehead would probably be ridiculed or even dismissed as lunatics. Real torture victims, it would be claimed, should be able to point to severe physical injuries as a result of their mistreatment.

Today, police stalking victims face the same predicament. If someone said that they had been mistreated by a police officer who assaulted them, knocked them to the ground, and violently kicked them, that would be seen as a perfectly believable account of all-too common police brutality. But if you say a plainclothes police officer followed after you with his car, then revved the noisy engine, and finally parked and blinked with the lights in an intimidating way, people will look askance and think you are mad.

Unsuprisingly then, when asked for photographic evidence of the mistreatment, police

stalking victims are rarely able to come up with anything terribly spectacular. Sure, you could perhaps publish some pictures of police officers and repeat offenders in the general population who collaborate with them. But the only result of that would be to violate the presumption of innocence, precisely the kind of violation that most police stalking victims have themselves already experienced.

The whole point here is that the concept of police stalking simulates normal behaviour.

Many events in a police stalking operation, at least those that take place in public, are situated on a continuum of everyday behaviour and rarely reach the extremes where they would impress others than the victims, who have seen it day after day for months and years. Only in those cases where the police gets a little to eager to prove its point does police stalking stray from the parameters of normal behaviour into the realm of abnormalities that perhaps would raise eyebrows even among members of the general population. It is in that limited window I’ll make an attempt to show some of what is going on in the operation against me. I am certainly not offering these images in the belief they can ever produce a verdict against anyone. Most are poor quality stills from videos, and they are deliberately chosen since the identity of the persons is not easy to establish.

For now, I leave the high quality material for the courts. The goal in this post is simply to raise awareness about untraditional policing methods in the hope that ultimately, hard evidence will materialise.

It is logical to start with the use of uniformed police. They are part and parcel of a police stalking operation, but they are often used sparingly. The reason is precisely that because they are uniformed and may be subject to requirements that they identify themselves, they are in some ways the most vulnerable element in a police stalking operation. However, uniformed police has to be there, since the whole point of the operation is to communicate the police’s ownership of the process.

When I was in Maasdam in the Netherlands between January and July this year, I was typically met by two police cars every day during my walks. Remember that I lived in a tiny place with no more than 2,000 inhabitants. Remember also that I was only near the highway for some 10 to 15 minutes every day. I can document an above-the-average frequency of encounters with uniformed police in this area. Still, I am perfectly aware that these observations are not going to impress anyone.

When police cars drive through affluent neighbourhoods in broad daylight without any specific mission, maybe more people might agree this is somewhat out of the ordinary. But perhaps only when uniformed police officers on bikes enter a desolete mountainbike trail a late Friday evening would outsiders agree that there is something odd going on.

Similar continuums from the almost-normal to the slightly unusual can be seen for many of the other components of a police stalking operations. Citizen stalkers will often be unremarkable. Additionally, often those divergences that can be helpful towards understanding what is going on are context-specific and therefore not immediately intelligible to a wider audience. For example, in the Dutch countryside, walking on foot away from specific walkways is seen as highly abnormal. If the Dutch are not in their cars, they cycle. If they walk, they do it as sport and put on prodigious amounts of specialised clothing to the point where they look as if they are about to embark on a North Pole

expedition. Accordingly, an old man sweating along a dirt road in the middle of summer is next to paranormal, even though few outside the Dutch context may recognise this.

Perhaps the best examples in this category are people who break the traffic laws and other regulations with the consent of the police. Examples include motorcyles on walkpaths or cycling paths, electrical cars in cycle paths, and dogs in areas where they are specifically prohibited (dogs were deliberately used in large numbers by Dutch police in the stalking operation against me).

The use of light and noise in the public sphere, two crucial elements of police stalking, calls for particular attention.

With regard noise and its “normality continuum”, most cars participating in police stalking operations may do perfectly normal things (apart from the fact that the same ones stalk you day after day). Accordingly, picture proof is once more of limited value. Often, the only slight exception from a normal traffic situation will be the disproportionate presence of noisy cars. They typically include modified or tuned car (“tuner cars”) – specifically lowered cars, cars with exhaust system modifications, tuned engines that make more noise, impossible rear spoilers etc. Sometimes, it is only the overuse use of heavy motorcycles like Harley Davidsons as well as fourwheelers (ATVs) that can divulge that something is not quite right. Evacuated vehicles left with motor and lights on are also common.

A similar continuum regarding the use of light can be found. A car blinking continuously with all lights could be “normal� when parked in the middle of the street. It could be described as somewhat zealous if parked on the pavement alongside other cars. Perhaps even sceptics would find it odd to see a car with lights blinking in a dead-end alleyway in broad daylight, or cars with high beams or fog light turned on in perfect sunshine.

Remember that a victim of a police stalking operation may meet these phenomena every 500 meters or so. Remember also that the use of headlamps is not mandatory in the Netherlands during daylight hours, so overuse of high beams etc. is unusual.

A peculiar component of police stalking is street theatre. Theatre is used for a variety of reasons in police stalking operations, and with differing degrees of sophistication and allegorical logic.

Not all of this is easily penetrable. Ever since I was in the United States, blind people or people with mobility issues have been used by police in the operation in numbers disproportionate to their share of the population. These poor people have already been victimised by the police through their deliberate inclusion in the operation and the apparent intention on the part of the police to communicate a sense of stigma; accordingly, it would make no sense to document their participation in more detail.

By far the most frequent theatrical element in the operation against me relates to my supposed original sin: Photography. Every day, wherever I walk, little photography scenes have been staged. Typically, these are people that stand and wait until I appear, at which point they invariably pull out a camera and begin taking pictures. Again there is a continuum here, with different degrees of eyebrow-raising behaviour. There are people who just happen to take photos whenever I approach. There are people with very elaborate cameras and advanced techniques. And there are people who jump out of a car exactly when I come and then take apparently meaningless pictures of the empty sky, sometimes with cameras pointing directly into the sun. When they ask me to take a picture with their camera, the parallel to medieval stocks is almost perfect.

It can be useful to revert to the image of the water drop that forms the weapon of Chinese water torture. The bigger picture is this:

Water torture In my case, I cannot provide that picture yet. Just imagine what it would have been like for that victim to try to document his ordeal! Remember also that stalking in the public sphere is perhaps not more than 10% of many police stalking operations, with noise and other harassment directed at private dwellings accounting for most of the police activity. But one day, that bigger picture will emerge.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

October 2, 2012

Although police stalking operations may involve parts of a local community whenever the victim is out and about, 95% of the illegalities usually go on away from the gaze of the public. In some cases, police stalking is primarily about harassment directed at the place where the stalking victim lives, throughout the day as well as during the night.

I’ll recapitulate briefly how these harassment techniques evolved in my case – from very primitive methods often used by European police against gangs and drug dealers, to ultramodern, little-known capabilities spearheaded by the United States for crowd-control

purposes.

To begin with, in Oslo in February 2011, the disturbance techniques were rather unsophisticated and mostly carried out through the use of unmarked police cars. A group of 10 to 15 cars kept driving in circle around my flat whenever I was home and basically made a lot of noise. At night they parked one of the cars just beneath the window of my bedroom and kept the engine running for hours. Sometimes the police officers stepped out of the car and shouted to wake me up. At the time I was terrified and could not think of any effective antidote, so I was unable to get much sleep.

The street where Oslo police harassed me every night in March 2011 When I began travelling in March 2011, I made sure to get hotel rooms away from the street. The police then began slamming the doors in neighbouring rooms to wake me up at night. For example, in Huis ter Duin in the Netherlands where I stayed between July 2011 and January 2012, I had room 568 in the older section of hotel complex, also known as the “grand hotel�. Even though most of that building was unoccupied outside the tourist season, the police gained access to rooms 466 and 468 right under me and used those rooms as a base for harassing me. The techniques included regularly slamming the balcony

door shut, constant slamming with closet doors for periods of 30 to 40 minutes, and hammers used directly on the ceiling (i.e. the floor of my room) to wake me up at night.

My room at Huis ter Duin in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, from July 2011 to January 2012 Other aspects of the harassment in Hotel Huis ter Duin were more peculiar than painful.

They included the use of an antiquated water system which made significant noise in all the toilets that shared the same pipe whenever one toilet was flushed (i.e. rooms on a vertical line from the first to the fifth floor). For hours the police would flush the toilet with a frequency of up to once every minute (I have tape recordings of this). The same technique was used for special effect when they woke me up at night by slamming the doors. When I got up and went to the bathroom there would often be a flush exactly when I entered. Obviously the chances of such a coincidence occurring naturally in the middle of the night when only 5 rooms share the same pipe (and when they are officially unoccupied anyway) are very small. Incidentally, the successful use of this method also shows the extent to which CCTV is being used to monitor me, since without it, no such precision hits would have been possible.

When I moved to a private apartment in Maasdam in February 2012, it appeared that the original plan of the police was to disturb me from cars in the main street. To some extent they could do this without fear of a negative response from the local community since most of the neighbours were elderly ladies who were nearly deaf. However, I effectively managed to shut out noise from the street by playing loud music at day and turning on the extractor fan in the living room/kitchen where I slept at night. This prompted a change of tactics by the police. The only other options they had left for disturbing me using traditional methods was from the roof and from the garage. They opted for the garage.

From April onwards, they put a vehicle with a heavy engine in the garage two floors down every night. When I went to sleep, they began revving its engine again and again, much in the way they had done in Oslo outside my bedroom window one year earlier. They sometimes also managed to wake me up again by repeating the same technique later in the night, although this was not terribly effective. To compensate, they would occasionally use

the roof instead to drop heavy objects onto my flat, but in general the police are reluctant to use roofs in these operations. They prefer to be invisible from the general public when they conduct the dirtiest parts of their harassment programme.

Courtyard in Maasdam used by Dutch police to harass me, February-July, 2012 Apparently unhappy with the results achieved in this way, another escalation by Dutch police ensued in June. This is the part of the operation against me that I am most reluctant to describe, because, frankly, I wouldn’t have believed it myself if someone had tried to convince me about it half a year ago. It’s certainly a tall order to go directly from writing about police methods that few have even heard about to describing torture methods that in the eyes of many verge on sci-fi. I expect few people will be convinced after a first read.

But I want to make sure that this particular aspect of the operation against me is on the record, because it is the most inhumane of all the elements involved in my case. Consider the possibility that important findings aren’t always recognisable as such at first fight.

Victims of torture are often not vindicated until long after the crimes have taken place. I have a troubling suspicion that what I am being exposed to will be used more frequently against enemies of the state in the future, not least since I have recently been able to connect it to general trends in the development of non-lethal weapons by law enforcement agencies in the United States and elsewhere.

So, one morning in Maasdam in June this year, I realised something had changed. Instead of the usual roars of car engines from the garage far down below, there were vibrations in my bed. I thought it was accidental or just some kind of weird hallucination on my part, but I got more worried when it resumed the next night when I went to sleep. I then tried to move my bed to different parts of the house, but to no avail. I changed from one bed to another. No luck. Later, the same kind of vibration appeared in the floors when I sat down to work at the computer.

I then thought I had found a solution by evacuating the flat. But I gradually realised the

same vibrations could be reproduced, with different degrees of success, in other houses as well. It even worked outdoors, though with far less impact. The main limitation seemed to be my physical movements. The vibrations did not affect me when I moved a lot around, nor did they seem to produce any appreciable effect in trains or buses.

Many will doubtless say my story is a case of full-blown paranoia. Two counter-arguments have been important to myself in the process of ruling out hallucinations. Firstly, the waves were sufficiently strong that a water in a bottle placed in my bed began making waves, so I was able to record it on camera. Probably not enough proof to win a court case, but sufficient to convince myself that I was not mad. Secondly, from the day they began the new regime, my tormentors suddenly stopped making noise with cars in the garage at night. Would it not be remarkable that they should stop so suddenly after having performed the same kind of nightly ritual in the garage for several months?

I’ll first try to describe this latest phenomenon in more detail, and then link it to known advances in unconventional “crowd control� technologies over the past decade, including controversial directed energy weapons that have been spearheaded by the United States.

The device they are using is best described as a low-intensity Taser or an electronic, wireless goad stick. It can produce throbbing, pulsating vibrations (typically 4-5 per second) whenever my body touches surfaces, including when I stand, sit or lie down. It can be used at great distance (probably more than 500 meters) and continuously for several hours. It seems to have its greatest effect when delivered from a room straight above me.

In hotels, the police always insist that they get a room on top of where I am staying. In fact, since I began travelling again in July, they have consistently been in the room above me almost every single night. But the device does not depend on such proximity in order to work. It can work indoors without any kind of technical preparations, even if I do a walk-in hotel booking directly at the reception. In this kind of situation no one will have been able to visit my assigned room in advance for technical preparations, and yet only

minutes after I have entered the device will work to some extent.

When the device is used from close range, it is often accompanied by noises of metal and material expansion in the building structure (similar to what some buildings produce when exposed to extreme sunlight). The primary limitation in the reach of the device seems to occur when I am on the move. Once I stop moving around, it usually takes at least 15 to 20 seconds before the device becomes effective again. Back in the Netherlands, whenever I sat in a train, my tormentors seemed to be able to operate the device when the train was standing still at stations, but it appeared to lose its grip once the train sped out of the station.

The vibrating sensation itself is not particularly dramatic, perhaps not more than the vibration one can sometimes feel in the floor when standing in front of a sink with water running at maximum power. The effect on the body ranges from mild to severe. There is always limited irritation from the constant vibrations when the device is on. There is sometimes visible static electricity in body hairs and a feeling of mild electrocution (similar to electrodes used in muscle therapy), often with a tingling and prickly sensation in the legs. And there are occasional straightforward electrical shocks and jolts which produce pain and involuntary muscle spasms. The vibrations target primarily the legs and the lower abdomen, although involuntary muscle contractions sometimes reach further up.

Because of two chronic health problems, the physical effect of the mistreatment is worse than the irritation itself. I have both ulcerative colitis (inflammatory bowel disease) and a chronic fissure, the latter being the result of dehydration and concomitant constipation I suffered after severe sleep deprivation resulting from police harassment in Oslo in February 2011. Both those chronic conditions are aggravated by high muscle tension in the abdominal region. Another effect of the police’s device is numbness in the legs. Lately I have had more persistent cramps in the legs, as well as flank pain and cramps affecting the bowels. These are of course extremely general symptoms, unlikely to be of much help in any medical workup. But if something happens to me, assume foul play. It is not PhDs in medicine that are operating these devices, and since the devices are clearly unconventional, it means I have the questionable privilege of being on the cutting edge of their “researches�, long before any risks relating to long term health issues have been determined by scientists. The fact that different torturers use different force levels indicate that there is no standardised parameters for operating the device. Since June, they have used the device for hours every single day and always at night.

Given the remarkable precision of the device and their ability to use it even in rooms where I am confident they have not pre-installed any kind of CCTV, I have considered the admittedly rather wild possibility that I may have been injected with some kind of

substance that can be used as a beacon. I have had some dental work as well as injections for anal fissure problems done in recent years.

I assume the vibrating phenomenon can be of electro-magnetic origin. So far, I have not had the possibility to experiment with electro-magnetic meters and Faraday cages in order to provide technically relevant observations. Generally speaking, though, most of what I have experienced is consonant with developments in so-called non-lethal weapons technology in general and directed energy weapons in particular. Conceptually, there appears to be a particularly close link to a device known as the Silent Guardian, developed by the Raytheon company in the USA over the past decade as a commercial and portable variant of “active denial systems” used by the US army. In particular, there is a close fit with the basic “prod” principle used for these weapons: The objective is to chase the target around through the infliction of moderate pain in the upper layers of the skin with the intention to force them to flee rather than to kill or cause permanent damage. These weapons are openly promoted by the US government, with the proud assertion that they do not discriminate with reference to sex, gender or race trumpeted as a sign of their supremely democratic and humane virtues at the Non-Lethal Weapons Programme website.

At the same time, some of the capabilities of the device used against me, including the ability to penetrate thick building walls with considerable precision, indicate a more advanced device than the handheld directed energy weapons described in the literature so far (which are based on millimeter waves). Another difference with the Silent Guardian and active denial systems generally concerns the level of heat. In the case of those weapons, intense heat is normally described as part of the pain experienced by the victim.

In my case, the thermal effects are not as prominent. This makes me think about an area of non-lethal weapons technology about which there is very little information in the public domain: Experiments to use microwave power to produce non-thermal effects, including muscular impact. Although detailed information is lacking, it is clear that for almost a decade, academics in the United States have conducted research on these areas for the specific purpose of creating a microwave weapon for the US army that can control muscular contractions at far longer ranges than the Taser. Among the researchers who stand out for their involvement in this project are Indira Chatterjee and Gale Craviso from an interdisciplinary group in Nevada, who have consistently received funding for such Mengele-evoking projects from the Pentagon over the last 10 years (and who have consistently trumpeted the alleged contributions to medical science of those projects).

Chatterjee & Craviso: Leading scientists from Nevada involved in non-lethal weapons development

In this context, it makes sense to add some remarks on a separate genre on the internet that I came across around a year ago: “Targeted individuals” and gangstalking. The victims described in those accounts show some similarities to the stalking that I am describing. To be honest, I have been sceptical about much (if not all) of what is written about targeted individuals. Most accounts are anonymous. Few targets seem prepared to admit an existing conflict with the police or the government, and many resort to general conspiracy theories instead. Targeted individuals websites tend to be of the old, static category, and it is often difficult to catch a glimpse of the individuals behind them. My preliminary conclusion has been that “targeted individuals” as a genre is probably a combination of many things – including real victims of police stalking who may feel attracted by the master narrative offered by the gangstalking genre, but also general internet hype as well as people seeking to discredit the experiences of real stalking victims.

Previously I always dismissed right out of hand gangstalking accounts whenever they entered into the territory of “micro-wave torture”. Then, this latest development in my own situation, where I come across something which I myself emphatically ridiculed only a year ago! The important point here is to point out that directed energy weapons is not sci-fi. In particular, the works of Neil Davison of the International Red Cross stand out as a prudent and objective description of this latest and worrisome turn in unconventional weapon technologies. Using among other things research proposals as a source, Davison demonstrates how law enforcement agencies, in particular in the United States, cooperate closely with the weapons industry precisely in the search for prod-like weapons for crowd control purposes. With respect to the targeted individuals genre and some of its more fantastic claims, could it be that interested parties have deliberately added some sci-fi elements like UFOs and mind control to the electronic harassment genre precisely in order to discredit real victims? The only thing we know for sure is that directed energy weapons are real, and we can safely assume that only a fraction of the relevant information is in the public domain.

Finally, there are some interesting international dimensions to the use of the prod-like device in my case. It began in the Netherlands, where the police may already have some kind of active denial capability on the US pattern. The device was subsequently used in Taiwan, probably with the consent of the local police since it was used even in sensitive areas like airports, even a short time after I had landed. The greatest shock to me was that the device is still being used where I am now, in a country in the Asia-Pacific with excellent democratic credentials and where the people have resisted several attempted US impositions, notably in the fields of military cooperation and nuclear technology. At first I speculated that the device was being operated by foreign police officers without the knowledge of the local police. However, given the extensive use of it, I am increasingly convinced that local authorities know about it and have approved it. It would mean yet another case of “NYPDfication” whereby inhumane American technology and policing

methods intended to instill fear are spreading globally with zero accountability and democratic oversight.

One thing I can’t help wondering about is what would happen if I travelled to a non-democratic country like China. A quick look at descriptions of what Chinese dissidents are going through make it clear that police stalking goes on there too. But the methods Chinese authorities use seem stone age compared to what is being used against me. The Chinese police would probably love to get their hands on this new technology!

But would the Dutch and Norwegians and any others cooperating with them be prepared to go along with that?

For now, I am doing my best to survive. At first I thought the device was so scandalously illegal that it was just some kind of nuclear option the Dutch were using to finally evict me from the country and get rid of me once and for all. Accordingly, during my last days in the Netherlands, I would sometimes stay up at night instead of going to bed, just focusing on getting practical things done ahead of my departure. However, when they continued to use the device abroad, I realised that it was not realistic to get away from it anyway. I was doing more harm to myself by cutting down on sleep. If the device permanently damages me or kills me, at least I will have done my part by informing about it. I see that as a duty.

Given the effectiveness of the device, I have a sorry feeling this an instrument enemies of the state across the globe will learn more about it in the future.

If you haven’t read the background to my case, you can find more information via this link.

October 9, 2012

Two weeks of blogging about police stalking in the first person have prompted many interesting comments from readers, but also lots of questions. The most recurrent ones relate to the mystery of why the police forces of so many countries would spend so much money on mistreating me for such a trifling issue as perfectly legal street photography.

Many have asked whether the real reason may have been my Iraq research. Perhaps the police persecution was caused by my criticism of pro-federal forces in Iraq, including the

leadership of the two biggest Kurdish parties and the Shiite Islamist ISCI? How about my focus on foreign oil companies investing in Kurdistan and my criticism of how Western capitalism fuels and exacerbates ethnic conflict in Iraq? For sure, that would have been a romantic story: An historian who was tortured for his work for the sake of Iraq’s unity!

But I don’t buy it. I have no empirical evidence to support it. I don’t think there is a Kurdish lobby in the Norwegian police. I have never been threatened by Kurds despite the fact that I have often disagreed with their leaders. The only serious threats I have ever received in relation to Iraq were from Norwegian shareholders in DNO (which invests in Kurdistan), but I have no information to show that this group is particularly influential in the Norwegian police or that any leading police official is a major DNO shareholder.

Instead, along the lines of my theory of “incompetence and unintended fragmentation” in Iraq (rather than a master plan for partition), I have offered a model of bureaucratic incompetence in my own case. Norwegian police start something stupid on a small scale.

Once the snowball starts rolling, they have problems defining a logical end to it. My stubborn refusal to go back to the criminal government that authored the miscarriage of justice against me surprises them; however, my preparedness to travel across continents in the search for freedom gives the continuation of the project a lucrative air miles factor that many police officers find quite irresistible. Norway being Europe’s Qatar in terms of energy revenue means this kind of gross misuse of state money can happen, even if it is not common. Once the operation gets underway, an unfortunate escalatory logic takes hold.

Perhaps social anthropology theories regarding exchange between “big men” in primitive societies is best fitted to explain it: Exactly like participants in potlatch and kula exchanges of old Pacific and North American civilisations, the police officers of each country participating in the operation against me try to surpass each other in implementing the illegal harassment protocol. Perhaps they may even have designated the operation against me as a case study in international police cooperation? Maybe a project to find out how far the police can go in terms of socially isolating an undesirable academic even if he has a good reputation internationally and lots of money to travel for.

There is one additional explanation for my misery that I have left out altogether thus far.

I’ll write about it now since I understand there is a demand for a fuller picture. Also, I have realised that certain people who are in a position to blow the whistle on the illegal operation against me do not have the courage to take action after all. In respect for them, I had waited; when they failed to act I owe nothing to anyone anymore. All options are on the table, including fighting publicly for the civil rights of the sexual minority to which I belong.

Sexual Slurs as Drivers in Police Harassment Operations

Shortly before I left the Netherlands, I made an important discovery relating to my case. It explained its logic, even if it is hardly the logic one would expect in a twenty-first century democracy.

While I lived in Maasdam, I had mostly tried to ignore my stalkers as much as possible.

However, every now and then I made small investigative attempts. One afternoon in June, I had just been passed by a gang of teenagers on a street corner. There was much hilarity on their part. Instead of continuing walking, I stopped, went back and eavesdropped on their conversation.

“We’re evil.”

“No, he likes pain.”

“Nooo. That’s not true”.

“It’s true. The police told us.”

That short exchange threw light on one of the things that had long puzzled me about the participation of citizens in the police stalking operation against me: How can so many people abandon the most basic principles of rule of law, surrender to wanton medievalism, and commit massive human rights crimes at the simple request of a common police officer? How can humans so easily turn into animals?

The answer is, they can do it because are targeting me as a sexual minority. What they said is true. I like pain. Or, more precisely, I am attracted to dominant women. I admire self-confident, assertive, arrogant, condescending, ego-centric and somewhat narcissistic women who generally believe they are the centre of the universe. I find female violence as esthetically beautiful and attractive as I find male violence disgusting and reprehensible. I like women who dominate men and I even like women who are sexually rather uninterested in men altogether. This is called masochism. I cannot offer any elaborate theory for my belief in female supremacy, nor do I see a need for one (much less a cure).

By way of disclaimer, I should put on record that I have never been the victim of any kind of sexual assault and grew up in a perfectly normal family where there was never any kind of domestic violence or gender bias one way or another. This is simply how I have thought about sexual relationships as long as I have thought about sex. I find women smarter and more beautiful than men. Whereas I dislike 97% of men, I dislike only 70% of women.

With that kind of world view, a belief in sexual female domination (femdom) is a logical conclusion. It’s not that I am necessarily looking for a lot of circus and traditional sado-masochistic clichés. I find psychological domination as interesting as physical

domination. But in a vanilla setting, I feel like a bad actor. As the very minimum, I am looking for recognition of my unconventional views on gender relations.

It is from these unusual thoughts the police derive fuel for their witch hunt. Regardless of what role may have been played by my Iraq research, it is definitely sexuality and not disagreements over Iraq policy that was used to sell the illegal harassment operation against me to a wider audience in countries like the Netherlands. It is the same kind of sexuality arguments that are being used against me where I currently am – a small, democratic country in the Asia-Pacific region with a generally good human rights record.

Here, the general population merrily participate in the harassment of me when I am out and about, and don’t seem to care one iota that I am simultaneously being subjected to severe physical torture through sleep deprivation and other forms of harassment affecting my physical health.

Once I had heard that conversation between the teenagers in Maasdam I understood many of the street theatre scenes the police had staged throughout my ordeal. The dominant poses of the women in the couples on the beach in Noordwijk, the constant chick fights along the routes I walked, the scene where a young woman was kickboxing against a Taiwanese soldier on the doorsteps of the Novotel hotel in Taipei in the very second when I arrived, the van with an SM logo that stalked me repeatedly in Maasdam (SM is a common abbreviation for sado-masochism). The inspiration for all of this must have been surveillance results gathered by the Oslo police in the period 2010-11, when I had no idea I was being watched by the police, and when my internet surfing habits will have been easy for them to record. I am not a fan of the goriest end of the SM spectrum and absolutely loathe cliché SM porn with drugged-down East European prostitutes who pretend to be sadists in one moment and masochists the next. Much stereotypical SM porn I find rather uninteresting. Still, the Oslo police will have been in a position to record visits to a number of websites with distinctive SM content. Favourite sources for quality SM erotica at the time they targeted me included websites made for and by real lesbians (quite superior to run-of-the-mill SM porn), Japanese erotic manga (no ugly male models), and a series of websites made by young German women which catered mainly for a shoe fetish crowd but produced some of the most brilliant SM I have ever seen (healthy models who genuinely seemed to be enjoying what they were doing etc.)

Many distinctive scenes from these websites were subsequently reproduced in street theatre by the police when they began stalking me. No other government than Norway could have had this information since I completely stopped surfing these websites once I realised I was being watched. It must have been the Oslo police that illegally passed this information to foreign governments – including those which deliberately reproduced part of it, like the Netherlands and Taiwan. In those places, guesswork about my sexual

predilections was subsequently spread to thousands of local citizens and tourists, in flagrant violation of my rights under the European and UN human rights charts.

Wait, a masochist getting tortured, isn’t that a contradiction in terms? In a word: No. Non-consensual torture of a masochist is just the same as rape. Masochists are in love not with the pain itself but with sadists. Masochists are not more submissive in their social lives than others. Masochists are no more likely to submit to a complete stranger than other people are. Given the need for trust in an SM relationship, masochists are probably even more discriminating in their choice of partners than others. Personally speaking, in my academic life I’m probably something of an intellectual sadist who doesn’t mind twisting the knife every now and then, although it has no sexual meaning to me. The percentage of women I’d be prepared to submit to sexually is tiny. Brilliant, intelligent and free women, great; collaborators of a stupid police state dominated by patriarchal conservatism, no way. The medieval Islamic slave soldier concept offers an apt parallel: Mamelukes were loyal to their owners but proud soldiers at the same time. Masochists aren’t pushovers and have no greater interest in being subjected to the transient sadistic whims of every Mary, Jane and Susie than anyone else.

The Logic of the Exploitation of Sexuality in Police Stalking Cases Does everything make more sense now? Legally, of course not. Even if it does not really matter one iota, let me make clear that my controversial photography was not in any way focused on potential sadists. Firstly, after years of mostly futile search for gorgeous sadists, I don’ t really believe in my ability to spot them on the street. Second, to the limited extent that I still have faith in parameters of external appearance as possible indicators of interest in SM, I am interested in marginality. I am instinctively attracted to punks, goths, emos and moderately butch lesbians even though I have no empirical evidence to show these groups are more interested in SM than others. My photographs, on the other hand, systematically and exclusively targeted mainstream fashion, i.e. the opposite. That was the whole idea behind the project: An attempt to understand the remarkable staying power of clothes brands that make certain street fashion prototypes in Oslo look exactly the same for five years in a row or more. Hell, it subsequently emerged that in my eagerness to document mainstream I had inadvertently photographed plainclothes police officers! It is true that the motives were mostly (but not exclusively) women, but then again women dominate fashion as a field in the same way as men dominate things I have studied in the past (like Iraqi federalism). Just because I happen to believe in female supremacy sexually, should I be banned from academically documenting and writing about female empowerment through street fashion, for example how ordinary women often trump the diktats of male designers? Does the fact that I enjoy a submissive role in a sexual relationship somehow take away from me the right to take pictures on the

street enjoyed by every other citizen?

But let’s go a little further and just for the sake of the argument assume that it had in fact been my goal to capture some kind of imagined category of “potential sadists” in my photography. That would still have been perfectly legal – although I would probably have achieved a far more satisfactory result if I had been stationed permanently outside a sex club or a karate tournament for women instead of doing what I did, which was to take pictures on my way to my job. Criminality would only have resulted if I had stalked a particular person (repeated photography), tried to photograph nudity (say, topless photography on the beach ), or actively staged and videotaped SM-like scenes in which someone was hurt (staged fights between women is actually a genre on YouTube). But I did none of those things.

The big irony here is that if my photos intended for an academic study of fashion instead had been taken on the beach, uploaded on the internet and then sexualised in a male chauvinist way – as for example in the creep shot genre – chances are that the Norwegian police would have laughed at them, quite in line with the existing jurisprudence on photography in Scandinavia. But despite the fact that my photography never violated any of the relevant legal red lines, it came across as mysterious to the police nonetheless.

Unconventional. And the police often respond with ferocity in the face of things they don’t understand. I am not suggesting they have a deliberate pogrom against all masochists; just that they systematically go for the fringes: Bikers, activists, rockers, just to give a few examples. The message is that If you are conform, you are fine; if you are original, you can be in trouble for the slightest thing – including legal acts that mainstream citizens are allowed to perform all of the time. For marginal people, secret trial by the police themselves and unusual punishment ensue; precisely because you are marginal, you cannot expect the mainstream to stand up for you. In Oslo a few years ago, gay police officers arranged Christmas parties in secret locations for fear of being harassed by their own colleagues (Aftenposten 18 December 2006)!

Sexual identity is a particularly central aspect of the police’s militancy against marginal groups. This is not a new invention. Back in the 1970s, East Germany’s Stasi focused precisely on such issues in its “disintegration directive” intended to socially marginalise enemies of the state. All sorts of hobbies and preferences were meticulously (and indeed “scientifically”) mapped, including sexual ones. More recently, whistleblowers in several countries have seen a disproportionate amount of sexual accusations coming their way, often without any decisive prosecution. In my case, with a zealousness similar to that of Stasi, Norwegian and Dutch police have been collecting the most incredible details of my personal life for the purpose of using them against me. Examples include clothes brands I use, the way I speak and my favourite music, all of which have been used by plainclothes

police officers to mimic me again and again. But the number one factor in recruiting citizens at large to harass me is sexual. You cannot mobilise a whole population against someone simply for listening to Pink. But how about this: He took photos on the street.

And he is a pervert. Those conjunctions float easily and cheaply in the discourse of the police, so cheaply in fact that few citizens bother to consider that the police’s reasoning has nothing to do with the law – and indeed that it violates the law.

The actions of the police in my case resonate with broader trends in European policing: A tendency of giving up the fight on some forms of traditional crime and focusing instead on spin-doctoring and building relationships with the mainstream in the general public. By way of example, in the Netherlands, police officers spend lots of their time on PR gimmicks like burgernet (citizens are invited to spy on fellow citizens) and Twitter (individual police officers maintain their own official Twitter profiles and spend several hours on Twitter every day). But the PR stunt to eclipse all others is police stalking: Let citizens perform criminal acts upon the instigation of the police and with their consent.

Pervo States If you think these confessions are getting overly intimate, consider the following. Firstly, I am a victim of torture. For more than 550 days, adults have been paid overtime by so-called liberal Western governments to wake me up repeatedly every night simply in order to deprive me of sleep. For 120 days, unconventional electronic devices have been used, with increasing signs that my general health is being affected in extremely serious ways. The police in 14 countries have circulated strictures on my sexual identity to thousands of citizens. In sum, there have been so many serious breaches of some of my most fundamental rights under the EU and UN human rights charters that I am at a point where I don’t have much dignity left to protect anyway. So before passing judgment, remember that if everyone had been tortured to the point where sexual self-inquisition was the only way to put the behaviour of the state in the correct legal perspective, the world would certainly look very different indeed. What I have described are intimate, private views that I had no plans to burden any fellow citizens with until I realised that those views were the primary reason my human rights had been taken away from me by the Norwegian government.

Second, think of my practical situation. There is no point in reaching out to people through blogging only to see any newfound sympathy evaporate in the very second the police declare me a pervert. That’s what happens in all the local areas I visit: Their message is that human rights don’t apply because of my sexual otherness. The concept of universality is gone. They even issue letters to the effect that they have no criminal case against me, and then they continue to persecute me! Gays must have experienced a logic

like this in many Western countries a few decades ago, and continue to experience it in many non-Western countries today. Sexual minorities that are not defined in gender terms are even more vulnerable than gays, who at least nominally have had some civil rights successes over the past decades. The only way to fight this kind of knee-jerk prejudice is to be perfectly open it and force the oppressors to tackle the contradiction of their own approach when considered in a universal human rights perspective. Perhaps only when citizens understand that they themselves may be next in line in the police’s relentless search for public enemies will they have the courage to take action against fast-spreading police criminality.

My contention is that the only perverts here are the state and its collaborators. The true depravity is the fact that Norwegian police are allowed to play judges in a country where the judiciary is assumed to be independent and where due process is supposed to prevail.

The debauchery consists of high-ranking figures in Norway’s Labour party providing political cover for thugs in the organised crime department in the Oslo police and their human rights crimes. As I complete this article, I read the sad story about a woman in Oslo who was raped by her partner to the point where she suffered internal injuries. The case against the rapist was dismissed by police for lack of evidence even though medical doctors had certified the extent of the injuries she had suffered. Exactly like in the case of Anders Behring Breivik during the months prior to his terrorist attack on 22 July 2011, the Oslo police had no resources to follow up. That same police spent millions of tax payer kroner on harassing me illegally on three continents in 2011 and 2012! Of course unlike the offenders in those cases – an honest male rapist and a bold rightwing activist – I had perpetrated a horrific thought crime that threatened to shake the foundations of Norwegian society: I had taken pictures on the street while at the same time belonging to a sexual minority which envisions women in a dominant role.

Sexual otherness does not in itself constitute criminality. An act which is legal – photography of fully clad people in publicly available areas – can never become illegal just because the photographer happens to belong to a sexual minority. I hope my case eventually will be recognised as the ugly discrimination and persecution case it is. The fact that it was authored by a government which enjoys one of the best democratic reputations in the world only goes to show how far the West has yet to travel before it truly lives up to its own lofty liberal and humanistic ideals.

For the background to my case, see this post or the About page

You know what? I’m not particularly bothered by the role played in police stalking by taxi drivers, delivery staff, hotel maids, waiters, shopkeepers, park workers, hairdressers, train personnel, municipality officials and foreign tourists. It is true that these categories form an important support base of many police stalking operations. However, thanks to the sorry state of the educational establishments in most Western countries, many people in these groups will never have had the opportunity to receive basic schooling in the fundamentals of the rule of law concept. Many of them will also have a type of work where there is often potential for conflict with the police, and where such conflicts are best avoided. That many of them would do exactly what the police says without thinking twice is both unremarkable and perfectly understandable.

How about the role of the police themselves? To be honest, I think many of them are simply following orders and aren’t necessarily very enthusiastic about what they are doing in stalking operations. Their education has taught them to not ask too many profound questions regarding the parameters of the police’s remit, so it would require a good deal of courage for any of them to blow the whistle once the police itself begins perpetrating crimes. True, the multiplication of “organised crime” units in Western policing over the past decades seems to have given rise to a generic brand of government-sponsored thugs across the globe, but their overall role in police stalking is still limited, at least in numerical terms.

Equally important here is the fact that any number of angry police officers will never be able to construct a police state on their own. The most critical factor in deciding whether police state tactics will succeed or not is the stance of the chattering liberal classes.

University lecturers, lawyers, schoolteachers, doctors, economists, bureaucrats, journalists and other intellectuals who will frequently claim that they are “liberals”. These are the supposed guardians of the Western rule of law culture. Because of their education, they know, or are supposed to know, that things like the presumption of innocence, the principle of legality and habeas corpus are sacred ideals that cannot be compromised by the police in a functioning rule of law society. Precisely because of their supposedly “independent” occupations, these groups have historically been trusted with special and leading roles in politics and society at large. If the system fails in a democratic country, a free press and a prospering liberal civic society may function as added safety valves.

Conversely, when liberals participate in illegal police operations like police stalking, they

become pseudo-liberals (or “bully worshippers” in Orwellian terminology). When that happens, police state dynamics can easily take hold. In a police stalking situation, the normal distribution of power between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary has collapsed: The police are themselves lawmakers, judges and executioners. Additionally, in most countries, “independent police commissions” are in reality fully or partly controlled by the executive, meaning that the victim of police stalking often has nowhere else to turn to than to “liberal” lawyers, journalists and members of the medical profession. When those channels are blocked too because “liberals” have opted to dance along to the police’s illegal tunes, few alternatives are left for police stalking victims.

It is for these reasons I find it particularly enraging to see assumed “liberals” participate en masse in the operation against me. I have seen avowed liberals working as lawyers, doctors and journalists in Norway and the Netherlands openly side with the police. Sometimes they even take part in the most medieval rituals in the harassment protocol, including deliberately taking staged photos in front of me (controversial photography being the reason for my trouble with the police). Where I currently am, cooperation with the police in unusual punishment can get you 14 years in jail, and yet highly educated members of the “liberal” public do not seem to care that they are breaking both the anti-torture act and their own principles by taking part.

Of course, I have seen ample examples of this pseudo-liberal problem in my previous academic work on the Middle East too. With regard to Iraq, back in 2007 it was often the most “liberal” commentators in the United States that insisted on a simplistic reading of the Iraq’s politics and the prescription of an highly inadequate and dangerous 3-way partition scheme. Today, journalists writing for US newspapers continue to do damage to Iraq by insisting on facile sectarian lenses for explaining the country’s politics to the American chattering classes, thereby often running errands for Al-Qaeda and Iran under a liberal flag.

Similarly, over the last year, my Twitter feed has bifurcated on another Middle East related issue: The use of drones for extra-judicial killings. What was formerly a mostly homogeneous feed of sensible comments on the region is now more and more divided between those who are prepared to call President Barack Obama a murderer for what his military and intelligence apparatus are carrying out in places like Yemen, and those who find such frank language unpalatable.

As a victim of police stalking, I find the drone issue a particularly apt parallel to my own case – and the defence among some brave liberals for the victims of drone warfare a source of hope. Precisely as in drone warfare, in police stalking a good portion of the assumed “liberals” around the world are suddenly prepared to give up hard-fought

principles like due process and habeas corpus because the target of the government’s abuse is a marginal person. When such irreducible minimum principles of rule of law are compromised by the very people who claim to speak in their name, the foundation of modern liberal society itself comes under threat. The good news consists of brave liberals who stand up for drone victims. Drone victims typically include outcasts and villains, but they have exactly the same human right to due process as everybody else. Americans who can insist on the rights of people in Yemen who may well be Al-Qaeda (e.g. Anwar al-Awlaki) could potentially also stand up for someone like me, extra-judicially accused of photography and membership of a sexual minority and persecuted with police methods that are likely to kill me sooner or later.

Of course, Americans will be accustomed to this kind of double standards among liberals given the influence of pro-Israeli currents in US politics for the past half-century. Through my own frustrated ordeal, I appreciate the Arab rage in the face of such double standards even more than before. There are crystal clear UN resolutions relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict which Israel continues to violate with massive support from so-called liberals in the USA. Like Arabs, I am beginning to realise that all the talk about human rights, anti-torture and the United Nations is often tongue in cheek: These are convenient slogans that are being bandied about only in contexts where they are completely harmless. They have no profound meaning any longer.

At the organisational level, two groups that I have been in touch with stand out for the preponderance of pseudo-liberals: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. While these are decentralised organisations where generalisations can be unfair, the trend that I have come across in Norway, the Netherlands and elsewhere is remarkably uniform: Amnesty and HRW are extremely angry about human rights abuse in exotic locations, but rarely dare to speak up against oppressors and human rights criminals closer to home – including the national police in the areas where they are based. I have seen Amnesty and HRW members refuse to take my case seriously, and I have seen members of these organisations cooperate with the police in the most primitive and illegal ways imaginable.

In terms of perverting liberal principles, many in these organisations are in a class by themselves.

It is also possible to identify clusters of pseudo-liberals in national and generational terms.

In my case, the Netherlands stands out for the contrast between its relatively liberal image internationally and the realities of widespread totalitarian attitudes in the population as seen in the preparedness to unquestioningly serve the police. In terms of Stalinism, what I saw during one year in the Netherlands goes beyond what I have seen in any other of the 13 countries where I have been persecuted. As for generational and life-cycle factors, “liberal” parents stand out as another group of particularly zealous participants in the most

perverted forms of police stalking. Often they are criminalising their own children in the process. One can sometimes get the impression that the act of parenting in itself induces greater subservience to the police and others authorities claiming to speak in the name of law enforcement. While this can be a perfectly understandable, biology-related form of protective behaviour among new parents, the question of the impact of parenting on everyday attachment to core values of liberalism merits more investigation.

Recently, many people who probably see themselves as liberals have raised eyebrows over my switch of focus from Iraq to human rights problems in liberal democracies. What I am going through in terms of police stalking is torture and sexual-minority persecution bankrolled by the Norwegian government. But you may need to be prepared to label Obama as a murderer before you can appreciate that.

October 16, 2012

In order to understand how state-led persecution of sadomasochists is possible in some of the world’s most celebrated democracies – including in countries like Norway, the Netherlands, Canada, the United States, France and in some of the best-ranked democracies of the Pacific region – it can be useful to turn to theories developed in the studies of religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire. In particular, there are instructive parallels to be found in Fuad Khuri’s seminal distinction in Islamic studies between “religious communities” (tolerated but subjected minorities) and “sects” (legally unrecognized groups susceptible to unpredictable patters of persecution). In modern liberal democracies, Khuri’s distinction is to some extent mirrored in the differences between how gender-defined sexual minorities (LGBT or lesbian-gay-bi-transgender) and “other” sexual minorities (including BDSM or bondage-discipline-sado-masochism) are treated as far as civil rights are concerned.

Over the past decades, minority groups that define their sexual identity in relation to gender – first gays and lesbians and more recently bi-sexual people and various transgender groups – have made the greatest advances in terms of constitutional and or legal protection against discrimination in the West. That is not to say that their civil-rights advances have been unambiguous, unilinear, or necessarily paralleled by an actual decline in discriminatory behaviour. Precisely like the religious communities of the Ottoman Empire

– primarily Jews and Christians – gender-defined minorities are still to some extent second-class citizens in many liberal democracies today, for example with respect to marriage rights. Also, the “integration” of these groups is sometimes accompanied by a degree of condescension not unlike that which befell minorities in the Ottoman Empire: When gays in official positions are paraded as examples of happy integration, it is sometimes unclear whether it really serves as empowerment or as a reminder about just how exceptional such cases really are. Nonetheless, in most Western democracies, LBGT groups have at least made sufficient advances that discrimination is now seen as uncouth in educated circles, and systematic state-led persecution of LBGT minorities would be rather unthinkable. When transgressions of the rights of minorities do happen, they are typically “condemned” and profuse apologies are offered (although not necessarily followed by effective measures to prevent such episodes from happening again). This again echoes the Ottoman record of mostly peaceful urban coexistence between Muslims, Christians and Jews that was nevertheless vulnerable to spasmodic rioting by urban mobs.

Very different realities faced “sects” in the Sunni-dominated Ottoman Empire, including Shiites, Alawites and Druze. Unlike the recognised non-Muslim communities of Jews and Christians, Muslim sects were seen as competitors to the mainline Sunni version of Islam.

Few if any formally recognized rights were bestowed upon them, and persecution was frequent, often accompanied by large-scale massacres. The state typically saw these groups not as second-class citizens or tolerated infidels, but as a threat to the very order of the state.

In modern democracies, a similar fate that has befallen sexual minorities that define themselves without gender references. Rarely have they been accorded explicit recognition as minorities. Instead, they have seen systematic state discrimination of the kind that gays used to suffer a half-century ago. Examples from the United States include frequent child custody cases as well as the official listing of some sexual preferences, notably some expressions of sadomaschism, as psychological disorders. Prominent academics with BDSM identity have been the victim of savage, identity-related attacks from leading forces in the media. In short, like deviants from Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, those who stray from orthodoxy in the modern heterosexual church can expect a rougher ride than recognized minorities.

The problems suffered by sadomasochists and other sexual minorities in liberal democracies go back to a definitional struggle about what constitutes a sexual minority, involving both legal and academic controversies. So far, in legal jurisprudence there has been a tendency of equating “sexual orientation” with gender-based categories such as gay, lesbian, bi or transgender. To some extent this is the result of gays and lesbians having fronted the pioneering struggles for the civil rights of sexual minorities, to the point where

micro-minorities within those communities like bisexuals and transgender persons were sometimes marginalized, both internally as well as in the external struggle. Conversely, other, non-gender sexual minorities like sadomasochists, fetishists and polyamorous people have seen very little in the way of explicit recognition of their minority status, with their legal status often depending on how open or closed the official definition of sexual minorities is. Like in the case of bisexuals there have also been cases of internal marginalization of these minorities, for example among parts of the lesbian community in the United States, which some decades ago saw rather aggressive attacks on lesbian sadomasochists by lesbians themselves.

Academics have also entered the field the definitional struggle. Some decades ago, a large body of scholars invested much energy in strenuously contending that BDSM sexual preferences in themselves aren’t sufficiently “primary” to form an identity category. This gender-fixated view of sexual orientation has since been considerably modified by post-structural and queer theory. Increasingly, static ideas of gender-defined sexual identity categories are seen as untenable. In fact, already in the mid-1990s, some leading lesbians in the US challenged the view of simplistic gender-defined categories when they put their BDSM identity on par with their lesbian one: In 1994, Pat Califia famously declared that, “if I had the choice between being shipwrecked on a desert island with a vanilla lesbian and a hot male masochist, I’d pick the boy”.

Despite changes in academia, legal definitions of sexual orientation still seem largely stuck in the pre-queer age in many parts of the Western liberal world. Minority relationship to gender (homosexual, bisexual or transgender) remains the exclusive criterion for defining sexual minorities in the legislation of countries like Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and several states in the USA. The weakness of these rigid approaches is seen in the way the initial dichotomy of straight/gay led to problems for many countries as soon as bisexuals appeared as a separate group. Illustrating the potential for ad absurdum processes, Australia has recently seen parliamentary controversies about the finer points of transgender subdivisions.

Some countries have more open-ended definitions of sexual orientation that at least potentially might offer protection for individuals who see the gender variable as secondary to their sexual identity. They include Belgium, Canada, France, Germany and Switzerland.

Canada has refused to define “sexual orientation” but a human rights tribunal ruling from British Columbia in 2010 explicitly envisaged the possibility that it might include sadomasochists. France, Switzerland and some provinces of Germany also have more flexible categories of sexual minorities: France used moeur or lifestyles in a piece of legislation from 1985, Switzerland refers to “way of life” in its new constitution of 1999, and some German states simply refer to “sexual identity” category, which clearly seems to

shift the focus from externally-imposed etic descriptions of sexual orientation towards an emic concept of sexual self-determination. Also the Yogyakarta principles adopted by a group of international experts of 2006 has a relatively open definition of sexual orientation: “Sexual orientation is understood to refer to each person’s capacity for profound emotional, affectional and sexual attraction to, and intimate and sexual relations with, individuals of a different gender or the same gender or more than one gender.”

The UK presents a mixed scorecard when it comes to protecting sexual discrimination beyond the gender-defined minorities. The UK anti-discrimination (sexual orientation) regulations of 2007 could be seen as refreshing in their apparent simplicity and true egalitarianism. Terms like hetero and gay did not occur in the regulations themselves.

Instead, discrimination was described in relation to “a sexual orientation which someone is thought to have”. That could in theory constitute a path-breaking way of rephrasing the whole problem: “Do not use my sexuality in any way to discriminate against me.” Sadly, though, in official explanatory guidelines accompanying the regulations, a more traditional gender-focused approach was used. Even transsexualism was explicitly ruled out as a sexuality, and instead only considered in relation to gender discrimination: “It does not include transsexuality which is related to gender and is covered in the employment context by sex discrimination legislation.” Accordingly, since transsexual attraction is denied as an acceptable basis for a discrimination complaint, one senses a more narrow conception of sexuality at work. Quite in line with this, the UK Equality Act of 2010 (which superseded the regulations of 2007) seems to reproduce a traditional gender-based focus: “Sexual orientation means a person’s sexual orientation towards (a) persons of the same sex, (b) persons of the opposite sex, or (c) persons of either sex.” Still, the fact that heterosexuality is specifically mentioned at least offers some dynamism in that a heterosexual minority group like sadomasochists might plausibly claim protection in the UK. In many other countries, including Norway, one has to deny heterosexuality to be protected by the sexual anti-discrimination clauses of the penal code.

Instead of creating ever more comprehensive lists of protected sexual minorities, general protection against any kind of discrimination or persecution that is sexual in nature is probably the most dynamic way forward for future anti-discrimination legislation. One sometimes hears the counterargument that this could be over-permissive. That really misses the point. Typically, there is fear that pedophilia, bestiality or necrophilia would somehow gain minority-status protection. But in most countries, specific criminal legislation is in place to guard those red lines of sexual behaviour for which criminal prosecution is deemed appropriate. Indeed, with respect to bestiality, one might argue that the field is so heavily legislated that it offers better protection for practitioners than for example BDSM in terms of establishing what is legal and what is not. Several countries including Finland and Sweden allow bestiality after previous bans on such practices were lifted by the national assemblies.

Meanwhile, a brief look at a Washington Post article that attacked UN arms inspector Jack McGeorge for his heterosexual sadomasochism in 2002 highlights the extent to which discrimination against minorities not defined in gender terms remains an acute problem. It also illustrates how, when a powerful media organisation or the state forces a person’s private sexual preferences into the public sphere, one does not really have the luxury of choosing whether to be a sexual minority or not:

Try, by way of a hypothetical, to substitute “gay” for “sadomasochistic” above, appreciate the impossibility of doing so in the real world of modern Washington DC, and you have the difference between a sexual “minority” and a sexual “sect” in a modern, still emphatically quasi-liberal democracy.

October 23, 2012

I had planned to finish an article on the latest developments in Iraq today, but the police harassment operation against me continues unabatedly 24/7, with continuous use of unconventional electronic torture devices that are likely to kill me sooner rather than later.

This leaves me with no other choice but to remain focused on Norwegian police criminality and the rotten Norwegian government which is ultimately responsible for the serious human rights breaches involved in my case.

In order to make sense of it all, I am trying to isolate factors that relate to my own individual case from more general and systemic factors that pertain to Norway and other

countries involved. With respect to the individual level, I was obviously vulnerable to police harassment because of social isolation. Ever since 2003, I had been working on Iraq-related issues 7 days a week, maybe 70 hours per week on average. Before that, I used to have a normal social life; by 2011, when the police began harassing me, I had few friends in Oslo where I lived. My social network consisted of Iraq-related acquaintances spread around the world. Also, in terms of my identity and citizenship I was an easy target: Having been born in Norway to parents of different nationalities, I had an incomplete sense of belonging to Norway (where I grew up but had no citizenship) as well as to the Netherlands (where I had citizenship but had never lived).

Then of course I had engaged in somewhat unusual activity, involving (perfectly legal) street photography for a fashion history project. This is where systemic issues peculiar to Norway and the Netherlands come into play. Recent weeks have seen much controversy over another, rather massive case of street photography that became controversial in the United States: Streetshot photos published on the Reddit website. Those photos differed from the ones I took in several important respects: They were focused mainly on underage women; they deliberately targeted people with minimal clothing on; they were published on the internet for huge audiences without anyone’s consent; the publication was accompanied by captions or category labels that were openly sexist in nature and clearly intended to sexualise the pictures; there was an outspoken intention to shoot the images surreptitiously for no other purpose than publishing them on the internet in the most sexualised format possible. Nonetheless, even though the legal framework governing photography in the US is similar to Norway, with respect to Reddit there was never any suggestion that this was something US law enforcement ought to look into. Instead internet vigilantism ensued, including the public outing of one of the most prolific Reddit contributors, Violentacrez. For better or worse, it seemed something of a free-speech liberal equilibrium had been achieved: If a citizen engages in controversial publication he or she may also see controversial accusations coming their own way, too.

Not from the state, though. Not in the United States, anyway. But in my own case – a far more limited, academic-related case of street photography – the response was vicious state-sponsored bullying, persecution and torture, 24/7 for more than 600 days so far. This is exceptional to Norway and the Netherlands, and it relates to systemic issues. I have already enumerated a few of them: The close personal ties between Norwegian Labour party elites and torturers and human rights criminals in the organised crime department of the Oslo police; the Norwegian “Uday Hussein factor”, i.e. the police officers who do the actual hands-on torture include people who publicly rub shoulders with government ministers; earmark budgeting by the Norwegian Labour government for developing illegal police methods like police stalking; Norway’s oil wealth as a factor that generally facilitates wasteful spending in government departments; the absence of constitutional or legal protection for sexual minorities defined in non-gender terms in both Norway and the

Netherlands; the lack of an independent police commission in the Netherlands and a very weak and government-dominated one in Norway. These are deep structural problems that are reflected not only in my case but in general issues relating to the rule of law in Norway and the Netherlands more broadly. In Norway, pre-trial detention is overused and psychiatric and child custody services have a reputation for authoritarianism; in the Netherlands there is a culture of impunity for police violence. In both countries, attempts by politicians to interfere with the work of the police or the judiciary are frequent.

There is one more general police-state aspect that I have refrained from commenting on thus far: The lack of prosecutorial independence in Norway. It is a little-known fact of comparative justice that Denmark and Norway are among the few countries in the Western world where the prosecution remains police-dominated. In most civil law countries (France, Germany, the Netherlands etc.), the judiciary is in the lead with investigations, sometimes with investigative judges. In most common law countries (UK, the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand etc.) – some of which were previously comparable to Denmark and Norway for their police-led prosecutions – the trend over the past decades, if not earlier, has been towards independent prosecutors (district attorneys in the US) or prosecution services that are formally separate from the police.

Conversely, Denmark and Norway stand out for the more extensive role accorded to the police in the prosecution, and especially to a group of so-called “police lawyers” in those two countries. Theoretically, these police lawyers also belong to a prosecution service headed by regional prosecutors (statsadvokat) and a national one (riksadvokat); however, administratively they are attached to police districts. The higher echelons of the system – i.e. the “pure” prosecution service – tend to get involved only in very serious cases.

Proponents of the Danish-Norwegian system claim that the process whereby representatives of the prosecution are stationed in police districts enhances judicial control of the investigative process. The counter-argument, obviously, relates to the very real danger that during the course of that process, the judicial officers get progressively further removed from the judicial culture from which they originate. If this goes far enough, it will reach the point where the police lawyers become completely co-opted by the police instead of acting as a check on them. Their relations to the prosecution services as such are increasingly a matter of fiction.

It can be further argued that this tendency of police co-option of members of the prosecution is actually far more pronounced in Norway than it is in Denmark. Key variables in this respect are numbers of police lawyers and hierarchy. For an instructive comparison, consider the police districts of Oslo in Norway and Fyn in Denmark, both with a size of roughly half a million inhabitants. In Fyn in Denmark, there are 5 permanent,

royally appointed police lawyers with defined thematic specialisations (advokaturchef in Danish); these in turn report to a chefsanklager (literally this means “chief prosecutor” but in practice s/he is the “chief of the police lawyers” and in turn responsible to a regional “state prosecutor” who is part of the actual, centralised prosecution service). By way of contrast, in Oslo police district in Norway, there are a whopping 140 police lawyers, 40 times more than in a similarly sized district in Denmark! There is no hierarchy and the turnover rate appears to be very high.

Other variables only underline the impression of a ragtag prosecution service in Norway.

Whereas in Denmark the police lawyers are non-uniformed and work in a joint office, in Norway, police lawyers are uniformed as police and spread across the police departments instead of having a joint office of judicial expertise. Their degree of co-option into police culture is very high. To the extent that there is group ethic, it seems to relate to the police rather than to the prosecution. With high salaries in the private sectors, those law graduates that end up as police lawyers aren’t necessarily the best material available; some Norwegian police lawyers are notorious for their cluelessness.

In other words, Norwegian police lawyers walk like police and talk like police. In my case I have even had two famous police lawyers participate in harassment activities directed against me! When members of the prosecution become so enmeshed in the criminal culture of the police that they participate even in extra-judicial punishment, how can one ever dream about due process and a just prosecution? In Norway, before the pre-trial hearing stage is even reached, police lawyers have so wide-ranging prerogatives that they can do exceptional harm to innocent individuals in terms of unlawful surveillance or baseless detention – even enabling personal vendettas by their police colleagues if they want. Chances are they will never be held accountable.

What this all means is that police state tendencies can thrive more easily in Norway than in other countries. Due to the dispersion of judicial knowledge in the Norwegian prosecution system, there are fewer checks and balances and less resistance to silly ideas by police officers who are making up their own laws. In this way, the prosecution in Norway is far more susceptible to pressures from police officers than in any comparable Western system.

This structural abnormality is so pronounced that only a non-comparativist can fail to take notice. It should be made relevant in any requests from Norway for international judicial assistance, especially since claims to represent the “judicial authority” in Norway (as for example in European extradition issues) can sometimes come from people who for all practical purposes are the police themselves. In this way, the point made by Julian Assange in his extradition case from the UK to Sweden regarding the nature of the Swedish prosecution and its susceptibility to outside forces could actually be made with greater weight in the case of Norway.

Sadly, the Norwegian government itself is mostly ignorant about just how exceptional its judicial arrangements are in comparative perspective. During a recent parliamentary discussion of the European arrest warrant, the ministry of justice even argued that it is unnecessary to legislate which particular level within the prosecution (i.e. the police lawyers or the state prosecutor) should sign off on a warrant! (Prop. 137 L 2010-11 chapter 11.) One of the few brave voices to speak up against the police’s dominance of the prosecution is state prosecutor Lasse Qvigstad. Of course, also the judiciary itself has a reasonable track record, with an admirable handling of the Anders Behring Breivik case even at the district court level, and a recent supreme court decision relating to free speech vs sedition in the case of the blogger and activist Eivind Berge showing that the judiciary at least sometimes has the ability to resist pressures from the rest of the political establishment.

But the basic problem consists of all the extra-judicial business that never reaches the court. Unsurprisingly, that same police-led prosecution that ruined my life because of street photography recently exonerated former police colleagues for an actual crime involving photography: Surveillance-style monitoring of the US embassy in Oslo for a private security company on behalf of the embassy. This involved not only photography (which is legal) but also efforts to identify the individuals on the photographs and their political preferences (which isn’t). As if to underline the point, that same prosecution service also recently exonerated the former police officers for having failed to declare their income from their illegal US embassy job, thereby evading income tax which they should have paid. That is the same police that fought tooth and nail against the introduction of anti-torture articles in the Norwegian penal code a decade ago. They are supported by the same Labour party that is terrified a new Norwegian constitution with a greater emphasis on fundamental rights will give too much protection (“legalism”) to its citizens.

All of the above are important factors that somehow don’t seem to fit into Freedom House and Human Rights Watch analyses that continue to give Norway unrealistic scores in international comparisons. They need to be included to show that Norway, while in many ways one of the most progressive countries on the planet, is in some ways also a judicial pariah. Meanwhile, for every single act of harassment and torture that I get subjected to by the police where I am, I’ll keep digging up and publishing dirt about Norway’s prime minister Jens Stoltenberg and his criminal Labour cronies – who bankroll this whole travesty, who are ultimately responsible, and who could have stopped it with a simple phone call if they had one inch of integrity. More torture means more revelations; that’s how it works. And there is plenty of material to work on regarding them and the rotten and corrupt system they preside over.

October 31, 2012

To the left, Eirik Jensen and Tom Østreng of the SO department of the Oslo police in 2007. What were their units up to in the first half of 2011?

Across the democratic world, a new accountability problem relating to the police is evolving: How can one best rein in the myriad of new police units that perform “undercover” operations, often of an illegal nature, in the name of a shadowy fight against a vague category of evil referred to as “organised crime”?

Unlike the traditional secret police – which in most democratic countries is recognised as a serious threat to democracy that should be monitored by independent institutions – supposedly “non-political” secret police has mushroomed in recent decades with references to the need to combat “organised crime” but with zero democratic oversight.

Since these new police units are not spies in the traditional sense, they are not covered by traditional oversight mechanisms relating to the secret services. For their part, traditional “independent” police commissions appear to have very little knowledge about how the organised crime unit units work and what exactly they are doing, for example when they use “disruption” as an alternative to prosecution. Such independent police commissions can perhaps deal with things like deaths in custody or injuries when someone is apprehended by the police. But they appear almost paralysed in the face of the challenge of “untraditional” police methods such as conspicuous surveillance and police stalking.

New police methods frequently used for “disruption” involve systematic violations of basic human rights like habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence and the principle of legality. In countries that adhere to the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment (1984), many aspects of these police methods are deeply illegal according to anti-torture legislation in force. In fact, in terms of potential jail sentences, police officers who engage in harassment operations that constitute degrading punishment are in many jurisdictions in exactly the same category as murderers of the worst sort. And yet, these criminal police officers often continue to operate and go unpunished; in some countries they even make careers in the state bureaucracy.

In a post-communist process of globalisation that combines the worst of two worlds – NYPD repression techniques meet those of Eastern Germany’s Stasi – these shadowy “organised crime” outfits continue to grow in monstrosity as sophisticated technological developments enable ever more invasive illegal operations against innocent citizens. There is, in other words, a serious and acute accountability gap relating to modern policing in the Western world. Thankfully though, at least in some democratic countries, the free press, activists or individual politicians have the courage to ask questions about police criminality on the rise. In Canada, the Star newspaper has brought attention to the widespread practice of undercover police lying in court, prompting a change in the ways courts deal with these cases. In New Zealand, the controversy around the Dotcom case has given rise to increased focus on at least some of the illegalities of undercover police more

generally, including the agency for fighting organised crime (OFCANZ). And in the UK, a Green representative in the London city council, Jenny Jones, has recently presented an elaborate list of queries regarding the Metropolitan police’s undercover operations, with particular emphasis on their conduct abroad.

The efforts of Jenny Jones in London are particularly interesting because they constitute a possible paradigm of action that brave parliamentarians in other countries could emulate.

Here is what Jones asked:

Similar questions should be asked in relation to Norway. In Norway, the organised crime section of the Oslo police has some of Europe’s worst state-sponsored human rights criminals on its payroll, and a budget half the size of the entire Norwegian secret police.

But there is zero oversight. With impunity, these fascist thugs commit human rights crimes at home and abroad, give presentations in academic forums such as the University of Oslo, and even publicly rub shoulders with high-ranking Labour politicians and government ministers. I have myself experienced more than 600 days of persecution, harassment and torture at the hands of these criminal types. My case, in turn, is connected to the wider failure of Norwegian police intelligence in the months immediately before the Oslo and Utøya terror attacks on 22 July 2011, which killed almost 100 Norwegians. In a well-working police system, the intelligence branch within the Oslo organised crime section headed by Hege Naustdal would have detected Anders Behring Breivik for his radical internet writings and then alerted the special undercover branch, Spesielle Operasjoner headed by Eirik Jensen. This never happened. Instead, resources and manpower from these units were diverted to the illegal operation against me in the UK,

US, Canada, Qatar, Jordan, Italy, France and the Netherlands during the months between March and July 2011 – exactly when they should have been keeping tabs on the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.

In Norway, there is no local-level parallel to the powerful London council with an ability to supervise the police. Instead, the Oslo police receives its funding directly from the Norwegian parliament, and it is parliamentarians (or the free press) that must ask critical questions regarding the Oslo police.

Here are the questions related to the Oslo police that the Norwegian director of the police and the Norwegian minister of justice should be asked as a matter of urgency: What was the undercover intelligence branch within the organised crime section headed

by Hege Naustdal doing in the period August 2010-May 2011, and why did it fail to detect Breivik when it had a specific duty to keep tabs on political extremism?

How many hours were spent by the SO unit headed by Eirik Jensen and Tom Østreng in disruption/conspicuous surveillance operations around Bislett and CJ Hambros Plass in the period between February and March 2011?

Were personnel in the Stop unit headed by Harald Bøhler at any point involved in operations unrelated to prostitution during the course of 2011?

What where personnel of the SO unit doing abroad in the period March-May 2011?

How many Norwegian police officers in total arrived at Newark airport in the afternoon on 25 March 2011?

What were those same officers doing in the small town of Princeton, NJ in the period 26-30 March 2011?

Why was a high-ranking officer of the Oslo police inside the Library of Congress special collections of newspapers in Washington, DC on 1 April 2011?

What was a Norwegian police officer doing aboard flight UA 917 from Washington Dulles to Seattle on 26 April 2011?

How many Norwegian police officers in total were in Seattle, WA between 26 April and 3 May 2011?

How many Norwegian police officers were aboard flight QR 52 from Washington DC to Doha, Qatar on 7 May 2011?

What were Norwegian police officers doing inside the guarded conference area of “Enriching the Middle East’s Economic Future” at the Sheraton hotel in Doha, Qatar between 8 and 10 May 2011?

How many Norwegian police officers visited the small Dutch coastal town of Noordwijk during the course of 2011?

Why did not the official police evaluation after the 22 July terror attacks address the complete intelligence failure of the organised crime section of the Oslo police?

What did the Oslo police chief, the director of Norwegian police, the chief of Kripos, the head of the police section at the ministry of justice, and the minister of justice know about the above travel activity during the course of 2011?

How many million Norwegian kroner in total were spent on these travel activities in 2011?

Why was there Norwegian police in the business class cabin on flight KL 807 from Amsterdam to Taipei (Taiwan) on 15 July 2012, travelling on tickets that came at a price of EUR 3,000 a piece?

I have in my previous writings put forward very serious charges against the Norwegian police. I am basically contending that Norway does not deserve its excellent human rights reputation and that the unchecked influence of the organised crime section of the Oslo police in particular gives the country certain semi-authoritarian and police-state characteristics. Wouldn’t it have been great if Norwegian police could provide clear and public answers to the above questions instead of having to whisper and cast slurs on my mental health and sexual orientation? Is the silence of the Oslo police, the police directorate and the minister of justice simply caused by the fact that they cannot provide those answers without lying in public?

If brave Norwegians parliamentarians could emulate the example of Jenny Jones in London, perhaps also the Norwegian rule of law system can be rescued from new and totalitarian forms of policing.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

November 20, 2012

Once more, the Norwegian political system has failed in its attempts to get to the bottom of the 22 July 2011 terror attacks and the question of how police failure played a key role in allowing those deadly attacks to happen. In a series of parliamentary hearings devoted to the independent commission report on 22 July, focus moved to the police on Monday, but no MP took any serious steps towards asking truly critical questions about intelligence failure and failed priorities of the Oslo police during the six final months leading up to the terror attacks.

High officials questioned before parliament during this latest session included former directors and acting directors of the police (Ingelin Killengreen, Øystein Mæland and Vidar Refvik), the former police chief of Oslo (Anstein Gjengedal) and the former the chief of Norway’s CID equivalent Kripos (Odd Reidar Humlegaard, currently acting director of the police). There were some minor admissions of failure relating chiefly to staffing levels and communications on the day of the attack, as well as a tendency of blaming politicians for not giving higher priority to the general disaster preparedness of the police. However, there was no discussion of the serious intelligence failures that prevented the Oslo police from stopping Anders Behring Breivik before he perpetrated the terror attacks. Nor was there any mention of the failed priorities of the organised crime section of the Oslo police, which had a specific responsibility for keeping tabs on political extremism, but instead devoted a considerable portion of their budget in the first half of 2011 on tailing and harassing me in 9 different countries for having engaged in perfectly legal street photography.

The problem with the 22 July debate in Norway is that it has come to focus myopically and ritualistically on a limited set of nuts and bolts issues relating to the technicalities of emergency response on the day of the attack. To the extent that any preventive dimension has been discussed at all, it has focused largely on the secret services of the police (PST) and the question of whether the government complex that was targeted with bombs should have been cordoned off. In this approach there is an underlying belief that the catastrophe couldn’t really have been averted, as summarised in the concluding remarks of former director of police Ingelin Killengreen on Monday: She was content to label the 22 July as a freak tragedy, expressing the hope that if it occurred again, police would be better positioned to cope.

Conversely, questions relating to the failed intelligence of the Oslo police during the run-up to the attacks and their crazy travel activity abroad between March and July 2011 have systematically been excluded from the debate so far. This constitutes a veritable lacuna in the history of the circumstances of attacks since the Oslo police – which gets its money directly from the Norwegian parliament – has a specific mandate for watching political extremism in Norway’s capital. But in fact, only one of the MPs involved in the hearing on Monday, Trine Skei Grande of the small liberal opposition party Venstre, came even close to touching some raw nerves regarding the Oslo police’s misconduct when she presented a couple of good questions to former police director Killengreen regarding the lack of a whistle blower culture in the Norwegian police. Those questions prompted only a jejune answer from Killengreen.

Of course, the chances that Killengreen would provide a truly informative answer on whistle-blowing issues in the Norwegian police is zero. The sad fact is that through her

alliance with Eirik Jensen of the Oslo police, Killengreen has been responsible for creating police units with some of the greatest concentrations of state-sponsored human rights criminals in all of Northern Europe, including most prominently the SO branch (spesielle operasjoner) within the wider organised crime section of the Oslo police. The use of illegal methods in these units is so widespread that the situation is consistent with classical findings in police criminality studies such as Goldschmidt/Anonymous (2008), where clusters of police officers used (and defended) any conceivable illegal method simply because they were convinced their target was “guilty” of something in their own (extrajudicial) understanding of things. Similarly, when it comes to the Oslo police’s organised crime section we are dealing with bad orchards and illegal subcultures rather than individual rotten apples. Unsurprisingly, back in 2003, the Oslo police alongside Killengreen as director of the police fought hard against the changes to the Norwegian penal code that eventually led to a criminalisation of torture, inhuman and other degrading treatment.

In Denmark, the ministry of justice played a key role in purging and ultimately dismantling such bad orchards of the police in the 1990s following a series of scandals involving their disruption squad (uropatrulje) and other criminalised police units (like the Christiania Rangers). However, in Norway, these police units in Oslo are allowed to continue their criminal activities with impunity. Chiefs in the organised crime section in the Oslo police today enjoy a position where they can use their own personal whims and grievances against what they see as “undesirable” individuals to act as jury, judge and executioner and pursue targeted individuals globally with the support of the Norwegian government. This goes on with the tacit support of the Norwegian parliament, whiuch continues to pay for the extravagant activity of the organised crime section of the Oslo police each and every year.

So far not a single Norwegian journalist has dared to write truly critical accounts about the crimes of these units.

All of this makes the organised crime unit of the Oslo police a far greater threat to Norwegian democracy and rule of law than terrorist loners can ever be. But perhaps so many people in high places in Norway have already bankrolled these criminals that the chances of getting an early end to their illegalities are limited.

A more detailed account of the intelligence failure of the Oslo police prior to 22 July 2011 is available in Norwegian here.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

December 10, 2012

It is common knowledge that since 2001, government operations lumped together as “the war on terror” have become an increasing threat to civil liberties in liberal democracies.

Key judicial notions like the presumption of innocence and due process are increasingly given short shrift whenever government actions can be justified with reference to the fight against real and imagined “terrorists”. In recent years, extrajudicial death sentences in the shape of drone warfare have come to epitomise some of the bluntest setbacks in modern times for hard-fought rule of law principles that were spearheaded by Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century.

There is a second, problematic government “war” going on these days that is getting far less attention than the “war on terror”. It is a war where the definition of the target is equally arbitrary, the transgression of civil liberties equally extreme, and the threat to the survival of western liberal democracy equally acute. It consists of a large number of shadowy police operations carried out nationally and internationally with reference to an assumed war on “organised crime”.

Today, “organised crime units” or “gang units” can be found in most Western democracies.

Exactly like in the case of the war on terror, their “war” involves carpet bombing vaguely defined targets in lieu of a normal judicial process. Since prosecution is no longer the main aim, a domestic equivalent of drone warfare called disruption dominates instead.

Police disruption methods range from rather innocuous elements like enhanced supervision and expedited trials, via illegal methods like police stalking and harassment, to serious torture crimes involving unconventional directed energy weapons.

The problem with organised crime operations is that the police tries to seduce the general public with fancy terminology in order to circumvent normal judicial procedure. Of course, the most obvious reason they are doing this is that they are unwilling or unable to bring forward a normal prosecution. The laws or the judges are “wrong” in the eyes of the police, or the suspected criminals aren’t quite as criminal as the police thinks after all. But instead of making this police-state admission publicly, the police concocts a whole new vocabulary intended to divert attention from their own basic human rights violations.

Exactly as in the case of war on terror, “organised crime” is construed so monstrously that the public is supposed to forget about human rights altogether. Suddenly every sex-work related phenomenon is seen as an expression of horrible “trafficking”. Dissidents of whatever political or cultural colour are labelled “gangs”, “hooligans”, “hackers”, or “bikers”. For undesirables that fit none of these categories, accusations of sexual “perversion” can always come in handy. In short, with the spread of disruption as a police method, due process and the presumption of innocence are increasingly privileges given mostly to red-handed murderers where the question of guilt is so obvious that the prosecution can afford to show a little magnanimity. For everyone else disliked by the police, there are disruption methods – punishment that is meted out with police officers as jury, judge and executioner.

This of course is not to deny the existence of organised crime as a serious threat.

Organised crime is real, exactly in the same way that terror is also real. But the definition of these problems is often so sloppy that the net effect of the government’s “warfare” may well be to undermine the concept of rule of law rather than to promote it. This is even more pronounced in the case of the war on the organised crime since few suitable monitoring institutions exist. The spy services who do much of the war on terror are at

least recognised as a threat to democracy and therefore have their own specialised oversight mechanisms. But the police departments that prosecute the “war on organised crime” are often subject only to ordinary independent police commissions. Such independent commissions are rarely equipped to deal with things that are more complex than police shootings and deaths in custody. As a consequence, even though organised crime units often possess exactly the same armoury of unconventional weapons that are being used in the war on terror, they are subject to far less institutionalised oversight and checks and balances than anti-terror squads. Ironically, some of the worst organised crime units thrive in countries like Norway and the Netherlands where politicians like to see themselves as particularly virtuous democracies and typically roll their eyes over conditions at Guantanamo. At the same time, these politicians are blind to the transgressions carried out by their own semi-secret “organised crime” police.

With respect to the war on terror, at least some civil liberties groups have been able to put systematic human rights violations on the agenda. By way of contrast, with respect to the equally grave human rights violations perpetrated by the police in their war on organised crime, the response from civil liberty groups is so far much more fragmented. Why is this so? One possible explanation is that many liberals may find it so much easier to defend people who live far away – say, drone victims in Yemen and Afghanistan – than engaging for the sake of dissidents closer to home. After all, defending the victims of the war on organised crime would often imply solidarity with sex workers, bikers, sexual minorities or football hooligans living in their own urban communities. Pseudo-liberals may find this to be outside their comfort zone .

In some countries, the development of organised crime units has gone so far that they represent perhaps the greatest threat against democracy since the Second World War and the police forces of the Nazis. A case in point in Norway, where the lawless but powerful organised crime department of the Oslo police is effectively controlled by state-sponsored street thugs with zero judicial expertise. The dominance of this unit is aggravated by several structural weaknesses of Norway as a rule of law country, including a culture of collusion between some politicians and human rights criminals in the police, a prosecution dominated by the police to an extent that is unparalleled elsewhere in Europe, as well as the absence of legal and constitutional protection for weak groups including many sexual minorities. Additionally, Norway exhibits an ironic weakness when it comes to secret policing. On the one hand, there is the police secret service (PST), which following a series of scandals during the Cold War era is now monitored and hamstrung to the point where even civil liberty groups sometimes pity them for their toothlessness and almost academic appearance. Large numbers of well-known Al-Qaeda sympathisers are benefiting from the reluctance of the PST to even monitor their activities in Norway. On the other hand, the organised crime department of the Oslo police – which includes some of the worst state-sponsored human rights criminals in the whole of Northern Europe – is

exempt from real control altogether. The lack of oversight is highlighted by the fact that the organised crime department’s indirect complicity in the 22 July 2011 terror attack is not even discussed in the independent commission report that was published after the attacks. During spring 2011, the people at the “organised crime unit” of the Oslo police who should have watched the rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik spent enormous resources on trailing me on three continents as extra-judicial punishment, justified with reference to (perfectly legal) street photography. The example shows how the elasticity of definition of organised crime – in this case singling out legal street photography as a “serious crime” worthy of “organised crime unit” attention – creates embarrassing and tragic failures on the part of the police with respect to their task of combating real crime, including crimes of terrorism.

Can these attacks on our democracies be dealt with effectively? Perhaps. Firstly, civil right groups must attack the Achilles heel of the police, which is their attempts to describe to the general public in the most innocuous language possible their own illegal activities.

Even if they rarely describe their dirtiest tricks, some of what these police officers say publicly is nonetheless often so extreme that it suffices as admissions of torture, harassment and unusual punishment. Again, Norway can provide relevant empirical information. For example, the anti-prostitution Stop project of the Oslo police has openly bragged about how it outsourced threats against prostitutes to landlords, intimidated people into accepting giant fines by alluding to the inconvenience of a public trial, and discriminated against transvestites by systematically revealing to customers their biological gender. Some of this constitutes prosecutable acts of psychological torture under article 117 of the Norwegian penal code, which includes threats made by public officials. To make matters worse, the leading Norwegian daily VG recently revealed that prostitution in Oslo has increased again despite the massive “police offensive”, meaning the only results of the “war on organised crime” in this case was a more insecure environment for legal sex workers, many of whom where thrown on the street because of the police’s threats. (Please don’t be surprised about their methods: The same Oslo police also systematically sends sniffer dogs on school classes without any specific suspicion, belittles Muslims and African sex workers via its Twitter account, and harasses its own gay officers to the point where they reportedly have their Christmas parties in secret locations.)

Second, it is necessary to enhance public awareness regarding the fact that many police disruption methods are judicially speaking the equivalent of torture and other unusual punishment. A law enforcement officer who tries to enforce something which is not the law is not only a criminal. Such officers are worse than ordinary criminals since their crimes involve state abuse of power, one of the greatest sins in a modern democracy. It is precisely for these reasons that a police officer guilty of extra-judicial or unusual punishment in many jurisdictions is liable to prison terms comparable to those for worst degree murders.

Thirdly, civil rights groups need to destroy the artificial schism whereby activists fight hard for civil rights in exotic countries but don’t dare support the victims of government abuse at home, such as sex workers or bikers. I remember myself having read about threats against prostitutes by Oslo police but didn’t reflect on it until the same animals from the organised crime department of the Oslo police that had previously harassed prostitutes beleaguered my apartment in Oslo for a full month in winter 2011. Only when the gap between different victims of a misconceived war on organised crime unite will a truly civic liberal culture and the rule of law prevail in our fragile democracies.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

January 15, 2013

I can easily sympathise with the outpouring of support for Aaron Swartz who took his own life this weekend after having faced the prospects of decades in jail in the United States for his computer hacking activity.

In the first place, Swartz championed academic freedom and specifically open access. He criticised the system whereby journal publishers make good money from institutional subscriptions to academic journals, whereas the authors who write the articles never earn anything, and the students who need the articles often face difficulty in getting access to them on a reasonable budget. The whole business of academic publishing has in many ways become farcical, with the supposed gold standard of “double-blind peer review�

often nothing more than barely disguised camaraderie.

Second, Swartz was a victim of prosecutorial overreach and law enforcement agencies abandoning entirely the principle of proportionality in responding to a perceived problem.

For a hacking crime that has been described as the equivalent of checking too many books out of the library, Swartz was facing the prospects of decades in jail and enormous fines.

Once more, one senses that the advocates of openness are the ones that are being systematically targeted by the prosecution, whereas crimes on the part of emerging big brother governments are systematically ignored or even encouraged.

We can only hope that Swartz’s tragedy will prompt governments around the world to rethink their current tendency of bullying, persecuting and prosecuting academics who refuse to follow the mainstream. With respect to my own case of law enforcement overreach, I hope the Norwegian government will abandon their 2-year long fascistic witch-hunt directed against me: Since February 2011, the they have deprived me of my most basic human rights in an ill-conceived international police operation intended as punishment for perfectly legal street photography for an academic project.

Thanks to the totalitarian tactics of the Oslo police, I was forced to leave my native land in a hurry and never got the opportunity to bring with me my Iraq materials. In solidarity with Swartz and the PDFtribute project, I will nonetheless take this opportunity to put online at least some of those Iraq articles that I have got copies of. My hope is that this tiny gesture will help put focus on the inhumane character of the war on academics that so-called Western liberal governments prosecute, in the United States and Norway alike.

“Policing a Messy Federation: The Role of the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court, 2005-2010”, pp. 12-18 in Orient vol. 52 no. 2, 2011 “The territorial aspect of sectarianism in Iraq”, pp. 295-305 in IJCIS, vol. 4 no. 3, 2010 “The Kurdish Issue in Iraq: A View from Baghdad at the Close of the Maliki Premiership”, The Fletcher Forum, vol. 34, no. 1, 2010, pp. 77-94 “Proto-political conceptions of ‘Iraq’ in late Ottoman times”, IJCIS, vol. 3 no. 2, 2009, pp. 143-154 “Historical Myths of a Divided Iraq”, Survival, vol. 50 no. 2, 2008, pp. 95-106 “Ethnicity, Federalism and the Idea of Sectarian Citizenship in Iraq”, in IRRC, vol. 89 no.

868, 2007, pp. 809-22

These are just a few of my Iraq journal articles. If someone has copies of other of my articles and wants to share them here, please forward them to me at reidarvisser (at) gmail.com and I will upload them.

January 23, 2013

British newspapers tell us England and Wales will be considering something called the “Nordic model” to tackle prostitution.

I don’t know much about prostitution in Sweden, which is the home of the idea of criminalising the buyers of sex (rather than the sellers) in order to deal with prostitution in a supposedly feminist-friendly way. But I know enough about police criminality in Norway as well as the art of deconstructing political rhetoric to say that a Nordic model does not exist in the real world, and certainly not as a success story.

The term “Nordic” has probably been attached to what is essentially a Swedish experiment in order to make it sound more universal and appealing. The problem is, there are only two other “Nordic” countries besides Sweden that have adopted the model. One of them, Iceland, is so small and the experience so recent (the law was passed in 2009) that it doesn’t make sense to use it as an example to argue for or against the Swedish model one way or another. The municipal area of the Icelandic capital Reykjavik – which presumably is where prostitution exists in any measurable way – has a population of a mere 100,000 or so, and as such represents just one of several dozen medium-sized “Nordic” cities.

Accordingly, the term “Nordic model” hinges on the inclusion of Norway, without which the bottom falls out of the whole concept. And the inclusion of Norway as a success story is clearly wrong. After the relevant law was passed in 2008 and enforcement began in 2009, the police and the Labour party used lots of resources on spinning the supposed success of its implementation. Eventually, however, even the official reports grew a bit more uncertain in their language, and the critics of the “Swedish model” in Norway grew louder. A good assessment was provided by Norway’s biggest daily VG in October 2012, when it found that prostitution had actually gone up during the period since the

implementation of the law, and sex workers soliciting clients seemed to be more openly on display in central Oslo than at any point.

Apart from actually increasing the prostitution, the “Swedish model” has also had the side effect in Norway of considerable police criminality on the part of the “organised crime” section of the Oslo police which was given a lead role in enforcing it through a separate project called Stop, headed by Harald Bøhler. The project has consisted of systematic harassment of sex workers, including throwing many of them on the street in a project officially called “operation homeless” (where the intention was just that, i.e. make the sex workers homeless even though the law only criminalises buying sex.) Other achievements of the Stop project include publicly belittling transvestites as a group. (VG 22 August 2011).

The Stop project of the Oslo police is part of a general turn away from traditional prosecution- the good old days when the police actually tried to enforce the law – to the anything-goes world of “problem-oriented policing”. Here the police become white van men (quite often literally, too, give the prominence of unmarked police vehicles in these operations), trying to concoct stop-gap fixes to things they perceive as “problematic” . This goes mostly goes on in splendid isolation from judicial considerations of any kind, and often directly in conflict with the law of the land. for example through group harassment and police stalking of people they happen to dislike.

On the other hand, many of the attempted traditional prosecutions by the Stop project, some of which consist of absurd attempts at defining anything the police don’t like as “human trafficking”, have generally been dismissed by the Norwegian courts, and certainly at the higher level. Indeed, it is high time someone reminded the members of the organised crime section of the Oslo police that there is something called the Norwegian penal code which applies equally to them as well. But quite despite the fact that many of the Oslo police’s actions are clearly punishable as psychological torture under article 117a of the Norwegian penal code with a maximum penalty of 15 years in jail (for example for threats putting pressure on sex workers to force them out of their home), the police officers involved in the Stop project have bragged about them publicly. That bragging, in the shape of systematic propaganda, Powerpoint presentations etc. is in itself punishable under article 140 of the Norwegian penal code for publicly glorifying criminal actions (maximum 8 years in jail).

So let’s nip this one in the bud: There is no succesful “Nordic” model regarding sex work.

A “Swedish experiment” seems a better term.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

March 10, 2013

To argue my case against the Norwegian police and their attempted criminalisation of my street photography, I have collated some thoughts on how my actions relate to Norwegian law, as well as the legality of the police’s actions. In what follows, I maintain that the only crime in this case relates to the police’s attempt to construe my street photography as a thought crime related to my sadomasochist sexual orientation.

Photography and Crime

I have emphasised in my past writings that in no modern, Western liberal jurisdiction is the act of taking a photograph of random people in a publicly accessible area an actus reus or a “guilty act” in judicial terminology. For photography to be criminal, there has to be specific additional, objective conditions. These include unwanted photography of the same individual on more than one occasion (stalking); attempts to photograph the private parts of an individual or someone inside their home (privacy violation); a violation of a specific injunction that photos not be taken in a particular, explicitly restricted area or event (designated military areas, border zones, some border crossings, courtroom in certain countries); subsequently publishing images in ways that may impact copyright restrictions or pornography laws (for example by explicitly sexualising images); photography that can be linked to a terrorism plot or other serious schemes to subvert the sovereignty of the state (conspiracy against the public safety).

This is how it works in most Western countries. For example, in London, the Metropolitan Police guidelines specifically say police officers must never intervene to stop photographers, including people using mobile devices, unless there is real terrorism suspicion. And this is how it works in Norway, too. An historical example: During the executions of war criminals after the Second World War, special instructions specifically prohibited photography during the executions, making it an exceptional actus reus and a specific example where photography is indeed legally “indecent”. (Of course, had photography been illegal more broadly, as it is in some Islamic countries, no such specific injunction had been needed.) Even privacy protections are interpreted liberally in Norway, since published paparazzi shots of the royal family on their private property have not been pursued legally by the police, even if a case could be made for it. Punishment for extremely invasive photography is also limited: A doctor who surreptitiously photographed the genitals of a large number of female patients during examinations was fined 25.000 kroner (USD 5,000) a few years ago.

Even the judiciary in New Zealand, probably the only non-Muslim, democratic country in the world that has ever tried to prosecute someone for casual photography has changed its mind towards a more liberal approach. A person who took numerous images of photographs of teenage schoolgirls from inside his mobile home without proffering “a legitimate purpose” on questioning was prosecuted once, but when the same individual was later prosecuted for a second time in The Queen vs Rowe in 2005, a high court ruling then concluded that the man’s photography of female students in a library had been “unusual” but not punishable. And thus ended New Zealand’s attempts to prosecute casual photography, with a subsequent law on voyeurism photography instead specifically criminalizing non-consensual nude photography only, as per the normal pattern in Western democracies.

In sum, across Western liberal nations there seems to be legal consensus that the single photography of a fully-clad person in a public area is never harassment, stalking, intimidation, indecency, threat, predatory behaviour, public order disturbance, privacy transgression or some other actus reus – and that several photographs, as long as they are of different persons, do not combine to form an actus reus. There has to be a sense of objective guilt related to other external aspects of the photographic activity for it to be criminal. Put differently, if something can be legally photographed by a Japanese tourist, it can be legally photographed by anyone. Photography as a method of documentation has been available to mankind since 1826, and during these 187 years democratically elected assemblies across the globe have had ample opportunity to restrict or regulate photographic activity if they felt the need to do so. They have gone into considerable detail to outlaw and ban other things they are unhappy with – in Norway, many cities now prohibit singing in public areas without the express permission of the police, whereas other countries have elected to outlaw drinking “or travelling with opened alcohol containers” just to make sure every conceivable eventuality is taken into account.

Only in those situations where there the necessary objective and external criteria are in place (stalking, privacy violation, prohibited area, terrorism etc.) can photography be designated as a possible crime. Accordingly, only when such external criteria are present is it legally interesting to know exactly what goes through the mind of photographers in the second when they capture a photograph. Only in such cases should the police even begin the search for possible intentions behind photography. Absent such additional criteria, it is simply none of the business of the police to enquire or even second-guess the motives people may have for taking a photograph. Indeed, if the police think they know what photographers think without there being an actual, objectively identifiable actus reus transgression, the question of whether the police is acting illegally immediately arises.

Legal Aspects Specific to My Case In my case, since Norwegian police has publicly and illegally constructed slurs about my sexual orientation and tried to connect those slurs to my photography in order to present them to the general public as a crime, I have elected to inform about my motives for engaging in street photography, even though the police had no right to even ask about them. I have explained that the photos were part of a historical-sociological project on street fashion, documenting micro-trends with a remarkable staying power in limited geographical regions for several years. Whereas my own photographs no longer exist (I deleted large amounts of personal material once I realised the police were illegally invading my privacy), those I made were comparable to some of the ones shown below:

The methodological problems I experienced in reconstructing just a few samples to illustrate my now destroyed portfolio vindicates my point about the usefulness of street photography for the purposes of documenting street fashion changes over time. Fashion bloggers aren’t really a good source since they represent people who are particularly interested in fashion, which is irrelevant if the goal is to document the mainstream.

Fashion magazines are a normative rather than a descriptive source, and as such of limited to value of documenting what is actually worn by normal people. In this case, among other sources, I had to resort to another street photographer in a nearby country which exhibits at least some parallels to Oslo street fashion – Copenhagen. Given the Oslo police’s apparent ambition of hunting down photographers globally I have withheld his name here, though I

would be happy to give due credit for these photographs if desired.

Let’s however, just for the sake of the discussion, assume that the Norwegian police’s assumption that the photographs could somehow be linked to my sadomasochist sexual orientation was in fact correct. As I have explained, to the extent that I care about such things, I am sexually attracted to marginality in fashion, like trends associated with goth and punk subcultures. If I had wanted to photograph people of those groups, I could have gone to rock festivals and places where punks congregate. The result might have looked something like this:

I didn’t take those photos or anything like them, and the police knows this perfectly well.

More importantly, though, I could have taken them without doing anything illegal even if this could be seen as potentially dovetailing with my own sexual preferences. Once a photo has been taken in a legal fashion – i.e. without being stalking, privacy violation or terrorism etc – the police have no right to even ask questions about what photographers do with their pictures (unless issues concerning publication such as copyright violatons, another objectively identifiable actus reus, come up).

But consider this scenario. Upon studying my photographs, I find out that one the women is in fact an extremely attractive young lady with an apparent predilection for goth-style clothes. I check the time and place of the photograph and show up the next week. She is there again. I follow after her home so I can establish her address and name. I do Facebook searches: It emerges she is a keen kickboxer too. I promptly fall in love with her and begin following her to boxing competitions. It emerges she is a lesbian, so there is no point in trying to establish a relationship. But I decide to ask her whether she might be interested in doing some SM modelling. Surprisingly, she agrees, because she is still a student and the money can come in handy. We agree to stage assault on teenagers of her own age, boys and girls, in quiet parts of Oslo where we are likely not to be detected by the cops. She will do the fighting and subdue her opponents; I will record everything on camera. I pay her 1,000 Norwegian kroner per victim. Maybe it looked something like this?

Now it is criminal. It violates specific Norwegian laws. It violates article 200 about forced participation in a sexual act. It violates article 228 about bodily harm. If minors were involved, there would be specific articles related to the sexual abuse of children applying as well.

But it didn’t happen. It was just a dream. Or a thought. The pictures are taken from a high

quality indie SM porn source and feature consensual actors; they belong to the “evidence” that the Oslo police has shared worldwide as indication of my supposed “criminal” intentions – because I simply looked at them on the internet!

Thought Criminality Criminal intentions – or thought crimes, a term coined by George Orwell in 1984 – aren’t normally punished in modern liberal democracies. In the absence of a criminal act (actus reus), it is simply not the business of the police to search for criminal minds (mens rea). It flows from this that the axiom that photographers want to have sex with their motives until proven otherwise is judicially uninteresting since photography as such is not more of a crime than eating a banana. And that’s also why it does not matter one iota what photographers think of when they do their work – be that geometric formulas, Hegelian philosophy or anal sex with a member of the royal family.

Beyond the philosophical and judicial imperative that there be both a criminal act and a criminal mind, practical considerations also militate against letting police investigate thought crime. The universe of prosecutable actions would simply become too big for practical enforcement. Imagine if the police saw it as their task to find out the reasons why each and every photograph around the globe was really, really taken. The principle of equality for the law would dictate that they performed constant inquisitions of photographers, with little time to do anything else.

Quite in line with this logic, most penal codes in Western liberal democracies do not define thought crimes as punishable offenses – Orwell, after all, was discussing a hypothetical scenario and tendencies found in some countries rather than a fullblown, existing reality. Accordingly, in Western countries, attempts to penalise thought crimes would be an infraction of the legality principle and its variants – no punishment without law (nulle poena sine lege), no punishment without a written law (nulle poena sine lege scripta), and no punishment without a certain law (nulle poena sine lege certa). The most notable exception to the tendency of not punishing thought crime may be Singapore, where it is specifically illegal to contemplate the death of the president. This seems to be a rare case of a thought in itself – for example in the shape of a dream – being punishable.

Seriously punishable at that: You can in fact get the death penalty. Unlike the Norwegian police, though, the Singaporeans at least had the whereabouts to formally codify their brazen attack on freedom of thought. In other words, a warning is in place: Dream carefully, lest you end up dreaming something criminal. Citizens can make precautions; even in its most illiberal incarnation, Singapore still has the predictability associated with a rational modern state.

From Thought Crimes to Real Crimes: How the Police Criminalize Themselves Back to the Norwegian situation, where there are no legal injunctions against dreaming or contemplating exactly what you want. Look again at the series of pictures. The first are comparable to the ones taken by me. The second set are photos I might have taken if I wanted, but didn’t. Finally, there is something completely different: Explicit sadomasochist pictures from a femdom internet site made by consenting adults. Does looking at the third group of pictures forbid or disqualify me from me taking pictures like those in the first or even second group? Of course not. There is no crime here according to Norwegian law.

With one exception, of course: The crime of the Norwegian police. Norwegian police had, at most, a right to invite me to offer an explanation for my photography. Even that could have been rejected by me on a sound legal basis. If they had asked, I would probably have explained the background, and never shot a single street photograph anymore in my life.

My thinking would have been that I don’t want to pick a quarrel with them; I would keep focusing my work on Iraq instead of picking a fight over photographic jurisprudence.

But they gave me no choice, since they began punishing me extra-judicially. Norwegian police first thought my photography was criminal – this they can do as much as they want, as long as they just think. However, they went on to pursue that thought in the real world, and that is a crime. A very serious crime. Attempts to extra-judicially punish someone through the abuse of state power are reckoned among the most serious offenses under most Western legal systems. In Norway, extra-judicial punishment is specifically punishable with 15 years under article 117 of the Norwegian penal code, and with 30 years as crimes against humanity under chapter 16 of the new penal code of 2005 (the sole chapter of the new penal code which has come into effect as of today).

Here we can talk about actus reus: According to article 117a of the Norwegian code, “A public servant who commits torture is punished with maximum 15 years in jail… Torture means to inflict serious physical or psychological pain on someone else”. When the police uses force to wake up an individual repeatedly in the middle of the night for a continuous period of 1 month on Norwegian territory and subsequently every day for more than 2 years abroad, this surely satisfies the criteria for “serious psychological pain”. When that same individual is stalked by plainclothes police officers and subjected to continuous noise harassment and staged social-isolation manoeuvres, the same legal article applies.

And when the physical impact of the mistreatment leads to the aggravation of existing chronic diseases (ulcerative colitis, asthma) and the creation of new conditions (chronic fissure resulting from dehydration and digestive problems), the requirement for physical torture is satisfied as well.

Moreover, for this criminal act, the mindset or mens rea of the criminal is also of interest, since the penal code goes on to specify criminal motives as “a motive to… punish, threaten or force someone”. Accordingly, it is critically important that officials of the organised crime unit in the Oslo police who targeted me have publicly admitted they systematically use these disruption methods to “put pressure” on people they don’t like. In other contexts, the have spoken about the desire to “stigmatise” their opponents. These repeated public admissions alone seem sufficient to satisfy the combination of psychological pain with the intent to threaten of article 117a. Even if it may prove difficult to document many such cases of police criminality, the police’s sheer bragging about these methods to the Norwegian media can in itself also be prosecuted under article 140 of the penal code for glorifying criminal actions.

This analysis explains why taking photos on the order of the police for the purpose of intimidating someone (mimicking, a mainstay of police stalking) can be added to the few types of photography that are indeed a serious crime. In fact, where there is a wider pattern of persecution, mens rea becomes so important that any every day act can be criminal as long as it is done on the instructions of the police with the intention to harass (and, importantly, only when it is done on the order of the police).

Thought Crime Persecution as a Crime against Humanity But is the actus reus of the Norwegian police in this case perhaps something more serious than torture? Consider the way whole local communities – including state schools – have been used to persecute me in a number of urban areas worldwide for my sadomasochist sexual orientation, with the children often ordered to take part in street theatre scenes intended as strictures on my supposed sexual preferences. The behaviour of the police is no longer affecting me only. What if a little kid in one of the state schools that participated in harassment of me because of my sexual orientation should happen to share similar sexual fantasies? What kind of terror will not s/he have gone through thanks to the thought police of the state? How about the feelings of handicapped people, who have been systematically recruited in disproportionate numbers to take part in the harassment operations in order to communicate social stigma?

Now we are closer to an even more serious actus reus described in article 102 in chapter 16 of the new Norwegian penal code of 2005, which is the only chapter that has come into force. The article says, “Whoever, as part of a systematic attack on a civilian population… singles out a group for persecution by depriving one member (or more) of that group of basic human rights… is penalised for a crime against humanity… with a maximum of 30 years in jail.”

Several characteristics of the crime of the Oslo police seem to fit this description, making it far more than the “isolated act of wickedness” that is normally used to differentiate torture prosecutions from crimes against humanity. The criteria of systemicness is satisfied by the transnational (13 countries), consistent (24/7) and persistent (2 years) character of the operation. The fact that the operation has been reproduced in a variety of countries ranging from democracies to absolutist Gulf states means it can be said to be an articulation of Norwegian state policy, another key threshold regarding crimes against humanity. Of course, the notion of “systematic attack on the civilian population” can be debated in my individual case, and is perhaps something that is mostly associated with traditional warfare. However, beyond the fact that the category of warfare is sufficiently elastic that there is place for paramilitary groups and renegade police units alike, there are two specific arguments that justify this description. Firstly, the way whole local communities have been targeted for extended periods of time – Noordwjk and Maasdam in the Netherlands stand out – the police’s persecution can certainly be construed as an attack on those whole civil populations, where entire sexual minorities must have felt threatened by seeing what was taking place. Second, when the illegalities of the organised crime section of the Oslo police is studied as a whole – some of its officials violate article 117a of the Norwegian penal code for a living – it makes perfect sense to conceptualise their activities more generally as a “systematic attack” on the Norwegian civilian population, thus fulfilling the framework criteria for a crime against humanity.

Said differently, what we have here is a gang of guys who roam the streets of Oslo in search of people they can terrorise and target through their preferred method of torture, which involves placing unmarked police cars outside their homes at night, keeping them awake with running motors and regular honks. If this went on in Oslo only, it could perhaps be described as a limited group of rogue officials. But then these same officials are allowed to repeat the mistreatment internationally, in towns like Montreal and Doha.

Now it is no longer an isolated act of rogueness. It is part of a systematic, governmentsponsored project to disturb and punish extra-judicially people who are designated as enemies of the Norwegian state without any judicial process.

This is, in other words, precisely the sort of totalitarian hate crimes on the part of modern state bureaucracies that chapter 16 of the new Norwegian penal code was designed to deal with. A plausible and prudent judicial approach to the police’s transgressions would probably be to prosecute the foot soldiers of the organised crime section of the Oslo police for torture under 117a with a maximum of 15 years in jail, and the decision makers, police lawyers and other responsible officials in the Oslo police, Kripos, the directorate of police and the ministry of justice for crimes against humanity under 102 of the 2005 penal code with 30 years maximum jail sentences.

Internationally, of course many of the partners of the Oslo police also satisfy the criteria for prosecution for crimes of torture and/or crimes against humanity according to national legislation in force. In most jurisdictions, acts of torture are recognised as one of the most monstrous crimes in the law of the land. Where I currently am, for example, any police officer or citizen who takes part in the operation against me in any shape or form is in violation of a crimes of torture act that carries a 14 years maximum jail penalty, or life in jail if the International Criminal Court gets involved. Given the number of countries involved and the fact that most them are full International Criminal Court members, it would probably make good sense to have an ICC prosecution for crimes against humanity in this case.

SM fantasies are not punishable in Norway. Conversely, attempts to punish such fantasies are among the most serious crimes defined under the Norwegian penal code. Put differently, “perversion” – as defined by popular conceptions of anything that deviates from heterosexual orthodoxy – is in itself of zero legal interest. On the other hand, perversion of government office – as when a priest molests a parishioner, a prosecutor makes up the law, or a police officer tries to punish someone – is among the most serious crimes that exist in the laws of Norway and most other Western countries.

In my case, the organised crime section of the Oslo police is trying to play the role of Orwell’s Ministry of Love. But 1984 was supposed to be only a dream. When a state uses it as an instruction manual in the real world, thoughts become actions, actions become crimes, and in the cases of crimes against humanity, the thoughts of the perpetrators are more important than in most other criminal cases. Let’s hope the members of the Oslo police involved in this case will one day have to explain their criminal acts and minds before an independent court.

March 19, 2013

The decision by the United States to go to war in Iraq in March 2003 changed millions of lives, my own included.

As someone who had studied Iraq since the early 1990s, I experienced the outbreak of the war in 2003 as the first in a series of onslaughts by the West on the complexities of Iraqi

history and civilisation. In late February, when the decision to go to war seemed almost final, I defended my doctoral thesis on the subject of regionalism in southern Iraq at Oxford. In the same period, as a newly graduated “Iraq expert”, I experienced zero interest in my angry newspaper letters about how the war would create more problems than it would solve.

Gradually, as the cakewalk vision disintegrated and the problems of “liberated Iraq” multiplied leading to the killings of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the Bush administration did begin listening to greater array of academic voices. After I had published my doctoral thesis on Basra as a book in 2005, the US government began inviting me regularly to conferences with the CIA, State Department, Pentagon and other decision-making bodies in Washington. I didn’t get the impression my suggestions about how to extricate the US from Iraq in a responsible way were really being acted upon, but there was at least some sort of dialogue. If I had any influence whatsoever in that period, it was probably related to my harsh criticism of the idea of partitioning Iraq. Other Iraq experts knew they would be in for the same criticism that I meted out to people like Peter Galbraith and Joe Biden, and with the exception of Michael O’Hanlon, few academics in DC joined the calls for partition. In my writings, I urged that Washington should refrain from reinforcing regional and sectarian identities unnecessarily – and that a less polarised form of Iraqi politics, independent from regional pressures, would have a greater chance of emerging if the outside world simply stopped reiterating the paradigm of a fragmented Iraq eternally divided among mutually hostile sub-communities.

In 2009, quite despite the fact that the Iraqis themselves for the first time since 2003 seemed to free themselves from that stranglehold of ethno-sectarian identities, complex ideas about Iraq came to receive even less attention in Washington once Obama was in power. Not only was Joe Biden’s simplistic theme of a tripartite Iraq alive in a conceptual way among Democrats, who kept focusing on “a power-sharing government of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds”. Increasingly, one could also get the sense that the idea of Shiitedominated Iraq gravitating towards the Iranian zone of influence – possibly in exchange for some kind of compromise on Israel, nuclear, or both – was seen not only as inevitable in DC, but in fact as desirable. Quite in line with this, Obama did absolutely nothing to intervene when the climate of Iraqi politics deteriorated dramatically in a sectarian direction during the de-Baathification antics prior to the March 2010 parliamentary elections. At the annual conference of the combined Iraq units of the CIA and DIA during the government-formation process of autumn 2010, I argued against the idea of a strategic policy council as window dressing that would never achieve anything in the real world.

For their part, Washington voices maintained the council would “make Sunnis happy” and thereby form a sound basis for a power-sharing government “with all major sects and ethnicities represented”.

In February 2011, my Iraq career for the first time came under direct attack from a Western country, when the Norwegian government began persecuting me for an academic project that was unrelated to Iraq. Unhappy with my inability to travel as much to the Middle East as I wanted for health reasons, I had for some time been doing street photography for a future historical-sociological project on street fashion. Without me realising it, this had caught the attention of the Oslo police. The police apparently understood my project was perfectly legal, but they disliked it – though without ever telling me. Instead they went on to punish me extra-judicially with harassment and disruption methods normally employed against organised crime: 24/7 tailing, extensive sleep deprivation, and a Stasi-style public witch hunt based on strictures on my alleged sexual preferences.

With a workaholic lifestyle typically involving 70 hours per week focused on Iraq and no holidays to speak of since the beginning of the war in 2003, I was slow to realise what was developing. However, soon enough the police operation began interfering with and threatening my work. Already in March 2011, a meeting at the oil ministry highlighted the contradictions whereby parts of the Norwegian government were paying my salary and others were seeking to destroy me. Inside the oil ministry building, I gave an invited presentation on Iraq after the formation of the second Maliki cabinet; on a hilltop overlooking the ministry, the same plainclothes officer from the organised crime section of the Oslo police that were keeping me awake at night had positioned themselves with an SUV pointing its main beam right into the conference room.

After four weeks of harassment and constant sleep deprivation, I realised Norwegian police were bent on using illegal and criminal methods in an unlimited way. I fled to the United States where I thought my extensive work for the government on Iraq might insulate me from further illegalities. During April, I held a series of invited presentations for the CIA and the State Department. On 22 April 2011, at the National Press Club, I suggested to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Greta Holtz that the US needed to win the debate over a residual American force that would remain in Iraq – if not Maliki would become overly reliant on the Sadrists and Iran. However, even as I was giving these briefings to high-ranking members of the State Department, FBI agents and State Department police were actively continuing the harassment within the precincts of US government ministries.

While I was still in the US, I got an invite to Qatar issued on behalf of the foreign minister, a close relative of the ruler. Despite that invite by a member of the royal family, I ended up being harassed by the emiri guards once I arrived in Doha. Norwegian plainclothes police officer were even allowed into the conference area at the Sheraton to intimidate me during the academic proceedings.

In mid-May 2011, I travelled on to Jordan, where I made an attempt at offering my services to the US government through their embassy in Amman. Apparently, the FBI or diplomatic security services interfered with my attempts to talk to diplomats, staging instead a meeting with an alleged CIA station officer who seemed untrustworthy and behaved out of character. I never got to see any diplomatic staff. After having loyally provided services to the US government on Iraq for 5 years, I was asked to never come back to the embassy.

This response came across as particularly odd given that officials working on Iraq at the State Department and the White House continued to solicit my opinions in e-mail correspondence for a long time following the incident.

Still convinced that some forces in Washington might be ready to listen, I continued to publish articles with suggestions for how the Obama administration could exploit the SOFA negotiations to create political dynamics in Iraq more favourable to US and Iraqi interests alike, at the expense of regional powers. Obama and his closest Iraq aides appeared uninterested in such potential complications for their withdrawal scheme. The US military left Iraq in shambles in December 2011.

As my travails continue, reports from Iraq are getting increasingly bleak. I feel vindicated regarding my warnings about the precarious and hollow nature of the November 2010 government-formation agreement and the subsequent failure of the US government to use bilateral negotiations to break the Shiite alliance into smaller pieces that would be less reliant upon Iran. Of course, when many pundits in Washington see the maintenance of such a sectarian alliance as a virtue, it is unsurprising that they should be steering the country directly into Iranian arms. Unsurprising, too, is it that the preservation of the Shiite alliance in Iraq has played a significant role in keeping the Iraqi government so closely aligned with the regime in Syria during the civil strife that erupted in 2011.

For their part, by way of response to these new trends, the Sunnis of western Iraq have taken unprecedented steps in the direction of federalism. Importantly, though, this is not a linear development that has evolved since the time Biden prescribed his partition fix in 2006. In 2009, these tribes were talking about forming a coalition with Maliki, precisely along the more non-sectarian ways of politics that I and others had been advocating. It was only the sectarian atmosphere of the 2010 parliamentary elections and widespread disillusion following the subsequent failed power-sharing deal that precipitated this new radicalism on the part of Iraq’s Sunnis – a trend only emphasised by recent defections from the Maliki government by ministers associated with the Sunni areas. Of course, to a considerable extent, this development can be described as something of a self-fulfilling prophecy after Western commentators and policy-makers have played their part in impressing upon Iraqis the significance of their sectarian identity in order to get listened to in the post-2003 chaos. If there is a lesson from the Iraq War, Fareed Zakaria, it is to stop

thinking and talking in simplistic and reductionist terms about places that simply are too complex for your talkshow format.

A note on the broader regional atmosphere seems in order here as well: The suggestion that the Iraq War served as inspiration for the Arab Spring comes across as ahistorical in the extreme. By 2006, the Arab world had largely concluded the war in Iraq was a disaster.

If anything, by the end of 2010, with sectarian fronts hardening in Iraq again, this impression had only grown stronger. In fact, a cogent argument in the opposite direction can plausibly be made: If it hadn’t been for the increased sectarian polarization in Iraq under the Obama administration, the Arab Spring – a natural result of stale authoritarian regimes crumbling under their own weight – might well have taken on a less sectarian direction, with fewer opportunities for regional states like Iran and Qatar to fish in sectarian waters.

Ten years after the beginning of the war, Iraq is in the midst of preparing for local elections set to go ahead on 20 April, the seventh such mass-scale polling event since the beginning of the war. There will be plenty of voices suggesting that these superficial steps towards democracy indicate the war was a wonderful success. But look closer, and things are not as satisfactory. Maliki’s State of Law alliance now looks more like a sectarian list than ever, for the first time incorporating Shiite heavyweights like Badr and Fadila. Even more important is the phenomenon of three all-Shiite alliance in areas north of Baghdad with Shiite minorities (Diyala, Salahaddin and Mosul). Four years ago, during the last local elections of January 2009, Maliki not only ran separate from the other Shiites here. He also engaged in significant coalition-building efforts with Sunnis in the period after the elections, something that seems rather unthinkable in today’s polarised climate. No major Shiite list has even bothered to run in Anbar where there are no Shiite voters. (Reports today say the provincial elections in Anbar and Nineveh will be postponed for a maximum of 6 months due to security concerns.)

And take another indication of potential success: The recent passage of the annual budget by the Iraqi parliament. It is true that Maliki managed to collect enough votes for this to reach just above the critical 163 mark. However, he did this mainly by relying on sectarian support from the Sadrists and ensuring only a few secular and Sunni deputies who changed their mind in the last minute (reportedly from the Mutlak bloc of Iraqiyya as well as the Free Iraqiyya and White breakaway blocs of Iraqiyya). That does not send any strong signal about a viable parliamentary base for the Iraqi PM. Compare with July 2008 and the parliamentary vote on similar issues regarding the relationship between the central government and the Kurdistan federal region, when Shiites and Sunnis were far more united during the debate on special electoral arrangements for the disputed city of Kirkuk.

Whereas the recent passage of the annual budget was basically about a majority of Shiites

winning over a handful of Sunnis and secularists in the last minute, voting patterns in 2008 testified to the existence of a broader cross-sectarian alliance.

As for my own continuing travails, some of my readers have suggested that my Iraq writings may be the real reason I was targeted so disproportionally by the Norwegian government. Many have pointed out to me the fact that Joe Biden, whose various plans for Iraq I criticised robustly and relentlessly in 2006-2008, is now the US vice president and in some ways the highest US official directly involved in Iraq policy-making. They have also referred to the fact that my criticism of Kurdish oil deals circumventing Baghdad may have been difficult to swallow not only for many Kurds, but increasingly for Western oil companies. Finally, some have pointed out that the ambassador in Amman at the time when I was so thoroughly spurned by US authorities in May 2011 was Robert Stephen Beecroft. He is today the US ambassador to Iraq.

Personally, even though it might have been very convenient to do so, I have refrained from suggesting a causal link between what I am experiencing and the apparent turn in US policy-making under Obama towards greater acceptance of an Iranian role in Iraq – perhaps with a concomitant migration of US oil interests to the Kurdish-dominated north.

Despite the superficial signs of convergence and the fact that the Norwegian government’s efforts to silence me and destroy my research may have played well in certain corners in Washington, I still adhere to a theory of bureaucratic madness as far as the actions of the Norwegian police are concerned. I think the idea that my writings should prompt any sort of inhumane response from the US government rather overstates my importance as an analyst, which was mostly limited to the steadily shrinking Iraq policy-making community in DC and never amounted to any leading role in shaping public opinion about the Iraq War. Even if some may have disagreed with my more politically oriented articles defending the vision of centralised government in Iraq south of Kurdistan, many seemed to think there was some value in what I provided of empirical detail on subjects like elections results, local council alliances, and federal supreme court rulings. Even after I was forced to change my research subject, many readers continue to follow my occasional Iraq writings without paying attention to the defamation campaigns and whispering that certain competitors in the field have embarked upon. It seems more significant to me here that in the second I began criticising authoritarian tendencies in the Norwegian government, the authorities there moved quickly to sack me from my job at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

In this way, my story offers yet another example of how Western policy in Iraq is so full of contradictions. Since 2011, the Norwegian and Dutch governments have used the full extent of their state machineries to extra-judicially destroy a person who by all accounts appeared to be somewhat useful to the US government, a NATO ally of theirs. By letting

police loose on someone who had committed no crime but provided detailed insights about Iraq, the Norwegian government helped further erode knowledge about Iraq and contributed to a less informed policy-making environment. The mental image of State Department police officers engaging in acts of harassment on the instructions of the FBI and Norwegian police during meetings I had with leading US diplomats in April 2011 is but one of thousands of similar episodes of Western governments working at crosspurposes in the Iraq War. It is an ironic source of consolation to me that while the Iraq War changed my life in disastrous ways, it also provided me with the background to understand extra-judicial punishment as one of the most monstrous excesses of the modern state, across cultures and continents. What I am being exposed to in terms of a modern day-witch hunt orchestrated by the Norwegian government is extremely reminiscent of what many Iraqis experienced in terms of extra-judicial de-Baathification in 2010. Of course, the lacklustre response by the international community to that affront to the rule of law should give pause. When I raised the legal issues concerning de-Baathification in 2010, the response from Western policy-makers wasn’t exactly deafening. Some worried about whether it affected Sunnis. Some Americans were able to point out some happy Sunnis. Great! The Sunnis are happy. The US ambassador to Iraq Chris Hill couldn’t identify any major problem, whereas UNAMI representative Ad Melkert, a Dutchman, bombastically declared that the elections had been conducted“according to the books”. No one was suggesting fundamental rule of law issues were at stake in any shape or form.

I had got used to the many jokes about the Iraqi “state of law” concept – a term that refers to the lofty aspirations of the political alliance of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and is also sometimes an unfitting description of the real-world Iraqi government. I now realise such jokes apply more broadly, to what we like to describe as “advanced democracies” like Norway and the Netherlands. Our governments’ incompetent handling of the challenges of our time – especially the evil twins of terrorism and organised crime – is clearly having effects upon our own supposedly liberal societies, often to the point where we contradict our own most basic values. When I see how savagely and irrationally these governments can turn against their own citizens, I realise it was perhaps naive of me to think that we could ever make any positive contribution in complex places like Iraq. It is of course gratifying that my articles about rule of law problems in Iraq are still being read, but it is ironic that only a minority is prepared to read my articles on similar problems in Norway, for which my source base is actually a lot better.

Conspiracy theories posit too much unity of purpose and rationality in modern bureaucracies. A theory of consistent Western ignorance, incompetence and bureaucratic madness seems much better fitted to understanding the complexities of the Iraq War and its

casualties. But these wars aren’t over: Neither Iraq nor I have been completely destroyed despite the onslaught by irrational Western governments.

Also of possible interest: My op-ed on the Iraq War legacy in The National

March 27, 2013

Legal reasoning is not of much help in my situation since Norwegian police keep waging an illegal campaign against me even though they officially admit they don’t have any criminal case against me. I will therefore instead turn to the specific and frankly absurd arguments they are using to convince the local population to participate in their criminal operation. Such local-level analysis is often the best angle for throwing light on the general phenomenon of extra-judicial punishment and witch hunts in modern states.

The Role of Sexual Orientation Strictures in Police Persecution Since I wrote my earlier analysis of the modalities of the police operation, I have been able to obtain some additional clues about how the police’s campaign of persecution is being justified vis-a-vis the general public locally. In addition to spreading rumours about my sadomasochistic sexual orientation, the police claim that I am fetishistically inclined towards objects in the pictures I have taken: This, in turn, ostensibly serves as a link between my photography and my sexuality, and explains, at least inside the police’s own heads, why so vast resources must be spent on persecuting me and punishing my street photography.

I have suspected this tendency ever since I encountered a drunk guest at Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin in Noordwijk in the Netherlands in December 2011. I was complaining to neighbours about severe noise at night, whereupon the neighbour, who worked for a Dutch telecom firm and was staying in the room beneath my room where guests were routinely asked by police to disturb me, broke out in laughter and shrieked hysterically, “It is the guy in the room above us! Nike! Nike! Nike!” I asked what had Nike had do with this, but he just kept screaming it again and again. I was stupefied at first, since I hadn’t been wearing any Nike apparel for ages, and since that brand certainly hadn’t featured prominently in the photography for which I was ostensibly being punished by the police.

With my latest findings, I am more convinced than ever that this outburst by a rather drunk stalker is a clue to understanding the police’s illegal campaign. The operational manifestations of this line of thinking are myriad: One of the main street theatre activities (quasi daily life scenes staged by the police) involves locals walking in circles on the beach collecting seashells in great quantities. This ritual – which has been performed with remarkable regularity from the Netherlands to the Pacific region – supposedly goes back to anthropological studies of fetishism, in which shells are a common object of worship.

Stalkers have been fitted with apparel that appeared in my photographs but that is deliberately worn in unseasonal contexts on instructions by the police, such as fur hats and winter boots in the middle of summer.

The police appear to take a particular interest in feet and shoes. Repeatedly, stalker cars have featured young women sitting in the front of the car with their legs outside the car windows while the car is driving at full speed, or the stalkers walk barefoot in autumn or winter.

Installations of differing artistic calibres supposed to reflect fetishist themes have been tirelessly arranged by the police wherever I venture, from Boston in the USA to Asia.

Particularly recurrent themes are abandoned shoes that litter the streets wherever I go, occurring with far higher frequency than one would expect in well-to-do, first-world semi-urban neighbourhoods.

Fetishism and Fashion Photography As explained in a previous article, from the legal point of view the police’s musings in this regard are one hundred per cent uninteresting, since photography of the nature that I was engaged in is not an actus reus or an objectively defined offense under Norwegian law.

Theoretically speaking then, in legal terms, even if what they said were true, it still wouldn’t have any legal relevance whatsoever. I would still be innocent, and their operation against me would still be a crime. The judicially correct answer to the police’s allegations is simply “I don’t have to answer you”. And to be honest, these are details with which I’d really prefer not to bother the general public.

Nonetheless, since Norwegian police have constructed an extra-legal witch hunt around this theme and exported it to altogether 12 other countries, it is worth taking some time to analyse their thinking and how it relates to my photography and sexuality respectively.

First, the photography. Yes, I confess, the majority of photos will have had specific clothing items and particular brands in them – including boots and hats which is what the police seem to be most interested in. This is after all quite unremarkable within the genre that we are dealing with here: To make a head to toe shot is the norm for almost all fashion photography. On the largest Flickr fashion subgroup, a specific injunction on etiquette indicates that images will be deleted unless they satisfy the head to toe requirement. Since Norway is a developed country and the images were taken in winter when temperatures typically reach minus 10 Celsius, it would be rather hard to avoid images with hats and boots.

Beyond that, certain items that feature prominently in the police’s harassment campaign against me – including fur hats and various footwear brands – were indeed among the principal variables that defined distinctive street fashion looks which I was documenting in my project. As such, they were deliberately included. Specifically, among the most recurrent variables included in the sample (alongside other items that I have seen no trace of the police taking any special interest in, like down jackets) were three boot brands and one fur hat type which exhibited interesting regional usage patterns and bottom-up tendencies in the shaping of Nordic street fashion. Firstly, the Hunter welly which enjoyed something of a meteoric rise after Kate Moss had been spotted wearing a pair at the Glastonbury rock festival in 2005. The trend stayed for rather longer in Oslo, where for the subsequent half-decade a substantial portion of its female inhabitants would put on their Hunters at the slightest hint of humidity in the air. Their main competitor in the battle for pre-eminence in Norwegian streets was a second item that was also included in my sample, a lace-up welly by the Danish designer Ilse Jacobsen which appears to have become more popular in Norway than in Denmark. Thirdly, the Sorel boot, a Canadian Arctic winter design that goes back to the 1970s, is an example of a bottom-up fashion development after it became trendy among ski bums throughout the northern hemisphere since the mid 2000s, if not earlier; it eventually rose to stardom in 2009 through its inclusion in the catalogue of US fashion distributor JC Penny. Finally, various incarnations of the giant fur hat briefly became something of a must-have item around 2010. I included it in my sample since it was interesting to see how it was adapted to and made an impact on existing prototype looks.

Examples of looks similar to the photos I took and which the Oslo police has used as pretext for persecuting me in 13 countries Beyond the theoretical assumptions that certain basis items like these influence street fashion and serve as a check on designer innovations, one very obvious advantage of using

expensive garments as variables is that the universe of investigation becomes manageable.

Contrast this with other, typically cheaper garments, especially jeans and sweaters, which exhibit almost endless variations. This again connects to theory: Given the higher price of these garments, they represent a higher investment on the part of the consumer, which in itself provides a plausible basis for hypothesising endurance. As a general point, many previous studies in fashion studies verge on fetishism in far greater way than mine did, including meticulous analyses of dress length etc. without accounting for the relationship between different kinds of garment. My intention was to rectify that rather mathematical bias as well as other methodological problems such as over reliance on normative sources (sales catalogues, fashion bloggers) instead of descriptive sources.

Sadomasochism and Fetishism So much for the photos. They had lots of fur hats and boots in them, as indeed was the intention.

Let’s then turn to matters of sexuality. I assume the police have based their analysis on my web surfing habits – that is after all where the police tend to go whenever they encounter something unusual. And no surprise, they may have found a good deal of boots there and even some fur as well!

Eureka? Did we just spot a crime? Am I under arrest now? Judging from the police’s belabouring of their hypothesis in the operational modalities of their campaign, it surely seems as if they credit me with establishing the connection between sex and the shoe, or between fur and sadomasochism. But the truth is, if the Oslo police wants to find erotica void of references to particular materials or shoes and boots with particular connotations, they may well have to go back to the stone age.

Let’s nonetheless focus on sadomasochism. As a genre, it is littered with links to fabrics and shoes and boots. Regarding fabrics, SM connotations go long back in history, including furs which appeared in the ground-breaking Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Later, other fabrics have emerged as signifiers of sadomasochist subculture, including leather, latex and PVC. With respect to shoes, there are also multiple connections and connotations. For example, in SM, high heels can be associated with subjugation and dominance alike, according to context. In more recent decades, lesbian and gay pornography have developed dominant ideals and stereotypes centred on army boots and engineer boots, sometimes as part of broader leatherdyke and -men cultures.

Lesbian butchism acquired iconic status in some of the great photography by Della Grace as reflected in the Love Bites anthology. Finally, certain shoe brands have achieved a certain fetishism status through the emergence of grassroots or indie porn; a case in point

being Buffalo Boots in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

It should be added that within the context of sadomasochism, these objects are often signifiers rather than objects of worship in themselves. Subs may typically fetishize objects owned by their dominant partner; conversely if there is no SM context, the symbolic value disappears.

More broadly speaking, certain fashion subcultures such as goth, punk, steampunk, and emo subculture have at times also acquired a symbiotic relationship with sadomasochism as a sexual subculture, or have become associated with kink positivity more generally.

This in turn have made for cross pollination in fashion, for example with items likestudded belts, black leather jackets and shoe brands like New Rock, Demonia and Converse. Some of these brands come from or lapse into mainstreamism, again others remain marginal and hence continue to serve as subculture signifiers. New Rock is an examples of a shoe brand that has remained strictly subculture. By way of contrast, Doc Martens have oscillated.

DMs may have been radical in the pre-grunge era of the late 1980s, but would not raise an eyebrow circa 1996. Various failed revival attempts meant that the brand recovered something of an underground position circa 2008, before another bout of mainstreamism took hold in 2010. Something similar happened with studded belts in the mid 2000s, whereas black leather jackets now seem to have become so irreversibly mainstream that they are pretty much devoid of subculture connotations.

To me, potential behavioural signifiers of the coveted dominatrix are more important than objects, as they tend to be more reliable. The best example is of course simply dominant behaviour in inter-personal relationships. That requires however both a high degree of social intimacy as well as duration of time. Potentially dominant behaviour that can be glanced from greater social distance include women who do martial arts or women who participate in social arenas traditionally seen as the preserve of men.

Aspects that could be labelled as fetishism are in my view inferior to behaviour as indicators of potential dominant instincts, since what people happen to be wearing in a fleeting moment on the street can often be quite difficult to relate to sexuality, and most certainly with respect to such a rare species as sadomasochists. To the extent that such things have mattered to me, fabrics have generally been secondary to aesthetical aspects – black leather can be great, but much cliche SM attire strikes me as rather tacky. As far as looks are concerned, I tend to associate certain fashion styles more generally with potential SM interest, such as military and punk. With respect to individual items, potential SM signifiers will have rather explicit and credible references to potential dommehood and stand out conspicuously in the crowd – metal belts, studs, spurs, metal-reinforced shoes or boots (say, steel-toed DMs or New Rocks) and other apparel that carries distinctive

connotations of warrior potential, rebellion and general mayhem. Some of the porn sites I used to look at included SM scenarios with a focus on shoes and boots in settings of punishment and discipline; yet again others had no such content whatsoever and instead focused on a myriad of more physical themes ranging from tickling via medical SM to sounding and pegging as well as SM lifestyle themes such as cuckolding.

These ladies are doing it right. But my street photography never focused on styles like these.

Let’s then discuss how this all relates to the police’s grand theory. As already explained, there are no legal ramifications. I could have taken pics with perfect correlation to my sexual interests (say, just for the sake of the argument, hordes of young female skinheads wearing steel-toe DMs) and there would have been no legal issues as long as I did not commit any actus reus relevant to photography. As for the plausibility of the police’s kindergarten justice, it also fails. Their crude generalisation that I should be fetishistically interested in any fur hat or boot they would throw at me carries no credible relationship to my complex sexuality as just described. The single boot or piece of cloth, in isolation, has zero interest to the cosmology of dominant signifiers that I am describing. A simple parallel to hetero-normativity should illustrate the implausibility and banality of this kind of thinking: Hetero-normative women are no more interested in the average idiot male in the street just because he happens to have a penis between his legs! Should we call every hetero straight woman a penis fetishist? (There is of course a certain percentage of males who do think women are universally interested in their penises.)

At times, the police appear to take a particular interest in certain brands of shoes when they stage their theatre scenes. They will presumably have seen a pattern whereby my photography tended to focus on a limited set of garments, including specific boots and fur hats. As I have also explained, some brands are indeed imbued with a certain fetishist value in SM subcultures, albeit clearly secondary to more trustworthy behavioural characteristics: A punk who does kickboxing or a discriminating shoeaholic would be great examples of how fetishism and behavioural characteristics can merge in interesting ways. But there is a new sub-set of problems in the police’s thinking here. The first, again, relates to the reductionism involved in conflating interest in an object in an SM context with pure fetishism: The idea that any woman could put on a particular boot and it would automatically be sexually interesting is again absurd and insulting in the extreme to many sadomasochists. Many gays have spent enormous amounts of time having to explain they may not be really interested in other men unless there is mutual homosexuality at work.

The same goes for sadomasochists, who fall in love with personalities above all, exactly like other human beings.

Beyond these overarching issues, in the police’s core argument regarding brands – as epitomised in the drunkard jumping up and down screaming Nike! after he had learned I was the police target at Huis ter Duin – they also fail spectacularly. The police’s claims may be due to the fact that a great German SM site that I visited a lot seemed to have a predilection for letting models torment their victims with Nike trainers. But the police’s reasoning exhibits some remarkable contradictions. First, there are some basic questions:

Why do the police believe the shoe brand is the interesting aspect in these photos, when it is clearly the act of a beautiful lady subduing a man that makes them dramatically unique and totally different from run of the mill photos of girls on the street wearing Nike trainers? The fact that the domme is dressed in streetwear may perhaps play a role in creating next door connotations and as such form a welcome realism angle instead of the usual porn industry cliches. But the extrapolation that every woman wearing the same outfit should suddenly be a domme is the police’s own, and it carries no more weight than the crude assumption of generalised penis fetishism among straight heterosexual women.

And as I have just outlined, in any case, the fashion preferences of that porn site actually did not particularly dovetail with my own ideas about fashion and SM correlations; in other words my interest in the site despite the lack of overlap with my particular military fetishist tendencies just goes to underline how it is the SM content that trumps any fetishism aspect.

Most important of all, though, concerning the Norwegian police’s grand theory of a Nike fetish which they have exported to altogether 12 countries, is the fact that I must have taken less than 1 per cent of photographs with Nike apparel in any shape or form – far less than the naturally occurring rate in a cross section of pedestrians in Oslo. If anything, Nikes were statistically underrepresented in my samples! Nike was one of several brands which I may have included in a couple of examples as possible harbingers of prototypes and micro trends, but which I eventually dismissed as uninteresting to the project (it gradually came to be more restricted to winter fashion). So if I have this intense Nike fetish, why do I systematically take pictures of lots of women wearing Hunter and Sorel boots, studiously avoiding the Nikes which are as plentiful in supply in Oslo as anywhere else on the globe? Is it perhaps because my interest in the SM website featuring Nike dommes derived from the fact that it offered something unique in terms of sadomasochism which had nothing to do with street photography at all? For the record, I also did no systematic photography of other brands associated with sadomasochist subcultures as outlined above. The odd DMs etc. that I photographed as possible signs of minor fads and revivals must have been less than 1 per cent and eventually played no important role in the portfolio overall.

In sum, the logic doesn’t add up even in the centrepiece of the police’s argument. To the extent that there are fetishism related themes in my sexuality, they are always subordinate to and defined in relation to an overarching s theme of sadomasochism. To posit a general sexual interest in shoes or boots or fur hats or whatever, as the police does, is a completely dehumanizing act, similar to what was done against gays for decades and centuries, when it was popularly thought that they were interested in anal penetration by anyone and anything.

Whereas the last thing I want to do is to belittle other people’s sexualities, to me the shoelicking business in isolation actually comes across as slightly meek and repetitive compared to the adventurous gladiatorial schemes that I have concocted through the years.

What about the pegging, the nettles, the hot wax and 1,001 other things that I prefer not to enumerate even in this moment of forced sexual glasnost – the police are not giving me much credit for that, are they? What about the femdom heroines in the medieval SM adventures of Anne Rice (writing as Anne Roquelaure in the Sleeping Beauty triology), or the Winter Journey story by Norwegian author Stig Sohlenberg (about E, a woman who gets abducted to a nun monastery; only available in Danish entitled En vinterrejse). Where do those mostly fur and shoe-less adventures fit into the police’s scheme? Maybe they are not interesting to the police because they simply don’t fit into their simplistic narrative?

A fetishist of the kind construed by the Oslo police might have been more interested in their own clothes and shoes, or even in the thing itself isolated from human context.

Again, nothing wrong in that, but it just isn’t me. Fetishism of the truly objectifying kind is actually far more pronounced in the world of candid photography by straight heteronormative males, which features a far greater degree of invasive photography than I ever engaged in, with endless close-ups of buttocks and breasts dominating the genre, often in such complete isolation from the rest of the persona that the label fetishism is fitting indeed. But tits and ass fetishism, where a pair of great boobs in many cases can make waves regardless of personality and intelligence, fits in with hetero-normativity. This, presumably, is also why it rarely becomes the subject of police attention.

Fetishism as an Intellectual Problem The intellectual problem at work here is called reductionism: Extracting a detail from a complex pattern and then imposing it as a general theme. That is the police’s fetishism, i.e. limiting my complex sexual cosmology to something can be understood by the public at large. They were probably bubbling with excitement as I researched this article, shouting jubilantly each time a photograph appeared as I searched for suitable images to illustrate the various points. A shoe! Another shoe! How criminal isn’t that? They certainly appeared to be scrambling for resources for their endless theatre performances, presumably believing that I had a sexual interest in absolutely everything I was searching on.

What the police confirmed was their own fetishism. I am actually not surprised. I have seen and criticised exactly the same tendency in Iraq studies too for more than a decade.

During my doctoral studies at Oxford, I was interested in complex interplay between Basra regionalism and Iraqi nationalism. After the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, I quickly got reduced to a “Shiite expert” in Washington circles, where there was a fetish for a simplistic, sectarian understanding of Iraq as a compact of three mutually hostile ethnoreligious communities. Quite like the police, many academics exclude everything that doesn’t fit their own narrative and interpret anything that conceivably fits their own ideas as decisive proof. Never mind some years ago the Oslo police paid for an expensive

doctoral study in police errors precisely of this “tunnel vision” kind; they apparently didn’t read it. Only weeks ago a Norwegian court struck down yet another amateurish case by the Oslo police – the Klomsæt case relating to alleged leaks of evidence in the 22 July terror attacks. In no uncertain terms, the court made it clear that the police at an early stage of investigation had fallen in love with a particular interpretation of the case, and had subsequently shunned all evidence that pointed in different directions than their own preferred interpretation.

What the police need to wake up to is the reality of our complex humanity. There are many things in life that may appear with different meanings in different contexts and have “dual use” potential – a term that historically was used to starve millions of Iraqis during the sanctions in the 1990s and is currently making the sky unsafe for Iranians. If the police were to criminalize everything in life that had potential sexual connotations, they would soon be running out of things to do. In the academic world alone, there would be thousands of similar cases of potential overlap and tangentiality. What about a lesbian sociologist who may have an academic interest in the emergence of tomboy culture? Is she supposed to be treated as a potential predator? What about the kinky university professor at an arts institute who also has an academic interest in tattoos? And in my case as a Middle East expert, what about the deeply interesting case of boyat (tomboys) of Iraq and the Gulf region more generally, often defining the frontline of the clash between religion and secularism in the Middle East? Since I have just declared a sexual interest in emos and women with butch tendencies, is this dual-use subject now off limits to me as a regional expert? Oh, and while I am at it, dare I mention that the oldest surviving photograph of a human being by Louis Daguerre from 1837 depicts a man shining another man’s boots as they were unknowingly captured on camera? Should we perhaps prosecute the great Daguerre posthumously since this scene after all is brimming with homo-erotic SM themes?

When Fetishism Leads to Police Criminality Maybe we should ask the Norwegian supreme court about these things? Or maybe not?

The truth is that these are meditations over morals that have nothing to do with the law and hence nothing to do with the police. The Pope might be a more proper address, or perhaps the clergy of Islamic states. But the Oslo police persevered with their extrajudicial punishment of my academic quest for categorization – a time-honoured scientific exercise that goes back to Aristotle and Plato. It is exactly the same brain that took those photos that has produced some of the most cited academic work on the intricacies of Basra politics, the tribes and families involved in the regionalisms of Southern Iraq, and their various sectarian and sub-sectarian affiliations. Since every professional historian is on a constant lookout for original and unique sources, it made perfect sense for me

academically to create those series of images. While working on a main subject, I have always used my left hand to maintain binders of numerous side projects that might potentially blossom one day, on subjects as diverse as Aden separatism, the status of Christians in Sudan, and demographic trends in seventeenth century Bergen. The advantage of using this approach is that when you finally put a side project centre stage, much of the source base is already there ready to use, enabling a kickstart. To me it was a perfectly logical choice to transform the boring daily commute through the icy streets of Oslo to something interesting, creative and systematic that would pay off academically in a future project.

Or so I thought. It is unsurprising the police never dared approach a real court with this travesty of a case. In judicial-sociological terms, what we have here are the workings of a kangaroo court. It is located in the central police complex in the eastern part of Oslo. It is strange court in several ways. There are no proper judges. Defendants are strictly prohibited from explaining themselves: Since the police have already made up their mind as to what happened and why, it is critically important that the accused is not given any opportunity to say something, lest the police’s own favourite storyline be disturbed.

(Today, after the Oslo police have spent millions of Norwegian kroner conducting a global witch hunt based on their own preferred narrative, this point seems particularly important.)

An inquisition? A too kind comparison. What we have here is actually inferior to the inquisitions of the sixteenth century: Whereas the ample use of torture and social harassment are common to both, medieval inquisitions did at least have formal judges and a process of questioning, sometimes with the general public as witnesses, providing a degree of transparency.

More relevant parallels are the ad hoc courts headed by vigilante Islamist groups of post-2003 Iraq. Sadrist extremist enforcement brigades form a particularly interesting, if technologically inferior, parallel to the workings of organised crime unit of the Oslo police. An even greater array of such groups materialised during the semi-official vigilantism of ad hoc de-Baathification seen in many Iraqi provinces prior to the March 2010 parliamentary elections, where any past connection to the Baath was used as a pretext for extreme threats and measures of social exclusion concocted by local politicians without any reference to the law. Yet another relevant parallel is the religious police of Saudi Arabia, whose fight against polytheism in any shape or form resembles the Oslo police’s crusade against perceived deviances from their hetero-normative sexual preferences. All of these parallels serve to underline how hypocritical Norwegian police are when they proclaim a battle against “morality police” among Muslims in Oslo. They themselves are acting in exactly the same fashion! The persecution of me in altogether 13 countries for my photographs means that few pictures have created such hysteria since the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.

In criminal terms, as I have already shown, the police’s operation against me constitutes an actus reus or a criminal act. This latest analysis of grotesque state fetishism adds information about the criminal mind or mens rea of the police, and underlines the particular monstrosity of their crime.It can be of central significance here do distinguish their crime from “ordinary” torture, and instead describe the similarities to a crime against humanity where the goal is to target minority groups in an entire civilian population. With the details that have emerged about the use of mass education institutions as elements in the police persecution (school classes are frequently enlisted to take part in harassment of me), we must assume that whole minorities in such population centres as Noordwijk and Maasdam in the Netherlands will likely have felt targeted when they saw what happened to me.

The basic message is that unless you subscribe to hetero-normativity or belong to an officially protected sexual minority group (most often LGBT), you can be targeted simply because of your sexual identity in many so-called liberal democracies. It doesn’t mean kinksters are systematically targeted, just that your human rights protection is weaker than ordinary citizens. In certain cases, deviance from the hetero-normative paradigm can be punished in the absence of any crime, exactly like heresy was punished in medieval times.

The failure of the police both in Norway and elsewhere to prosecute photographers who shoot far more intimate and truly privacy-invading pictures of “hot babes” per the “tits and ass” paradigm speaks volumes about the hypocrisy at work. With regard to me, they even issued a formal letter to the effect they had no criminal case against me, yet went on to punish me extra-judicially. The message couldn’t have been clearer: My only crime is my sexual orientation.

It is humane to be reductionist. The police should not be afraid of their fetishisms.

However, when they use their fetishisms to prosecute hate campaigns that amount to global witch hunts, their fetishisms become not only criminal, but a crime against humanity. Sadomasochism with all its diverse subgenres is part of that humanity; extrajudicial punishment is not.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

April 2, 2013

Officialdom and Torture in 21st century New Zealand: OFCANZ chief Malcolm Burgess, Wellington police commander Mike Rusbatch and Kapiti police chief Alasdair Macmillan. These officers must at least assume the nominal responsibility for the rampant crimes of torture committed by New Zealand Police in their jurisdictions and units.

After 8 months in New Zealand , the time has come to say goodbye. It is fair to say my expectations about a visit to a model democracy were crushed.

It makes sense to start my goodbyes with you, Mr. Key. You are the leader of a country which considers itself among the foremost examples of democracy and the rule of law in

the world. It was with that splendid reputation in mind I decided to visit you, after my most basic human rights had been taken from me in my home country in Europe. And yet after 8 months, I am sorry to report that in terms of police criminality and widespread statesponsored vigilantism you do not live up to your democratic ideals at all. Quite the contrary, your police wantonly indulged in all the human rights transgressions that form the mainstay of police stalking: Conspicuous surveillance, the enlistment of citizen stalkers, street theatre calculated to resonate with the police’s rather absurd theories about the victim’s sexual orientation, and extensive use of electro-magnetic torture devices. All this extra-judicial punishment was meted out to me, a visitor and an EU citizen who had never before been to New Zealand, without any sort of due process. It was all done simply upon instructions from foreign governments.

Among the most depraved aspects of police criminality during my stay in New Zealand was the extensive use of educational state institutions in citizen stalking focused on stigmatisation of sexual minority groups like sadomasochists, fetishists and other kinksters. This tendency was at is strongest in the Raumati area on the Kapiti coast, where children aged 6 to 15 were indoctrinated en masse to persecute sexual dissenters and their deviations from the hetero-normative paradigm after my arrival there. In the period November 2012-March 2013, in mass recruitment exercises reminiscent of Hitler jugend activities, children and teenagers at schools in Raumati and Raumati South (including Kapiti College) were instructed by police, government teachers or even their own parents to engage in acts like demonstratively sitting with feet on railway seats on the commuter train to Wellington, walking barefoot in public areas, or engage in various forms of street theatre intended as strictures on people of a sadomasochist sexual orientation. This is not only among the most disgusting features of your crime: It is also what sets it apart from ordinary crimes of torture and makes it a crime against humanity for which high officials of your government will hopefully one day have to answer before the International Criminal Court.

Wellingtonians and foreigners alike became very interested in photography in autumn 2012 Another exceptionally shocking transgression involves the daily and increasingly more intensive use of severe electro-magnetic torture for around 250 days. You are the country that has permitted the longest known deployment of this Mengele-inspired weapon that

was introduced to the operation by Dutch authorities in June 2011. Of course, it is difficult to prove that this unconventional device was used to wake me up on average 5 to 7 times every night and to chase me out of the places where I was staying. But ask the citizens of Raumati South, who knew perfectly well what sort of social harassment I had to endure in public spaces. When I nonetheless opted to sit long hours on the train from Paraparaumu to Wellington every day just to get away from the most intense mistreatment in my rented home and have the ability to do some academic work, perhaps that may serve as an indication of the grotesque scale of what was going on?

Good bye, foreign minister, I wished to say a special greeting to you since I have had occasion to meet with some of your officials at earlier stages of my career. Back then, they were interested in my academic contribution to the reconstruction of Iraq – a field where I am still reckoned as a leading expert worldwide despite having been persecuted by Norwegian police for more than two years. You, as a government, ended up in a bigoted war against knowledge. As I was completing the first analysis in any language of the 8,000 candidates to the Iraqi local elections on 20 April, the police of Kapiti sent people into trains on the Wellington commuter line to harass me. As I was writing up a commentary on the legality of the partial delay in two provinces of those Iraqi elections, the Kapiti police reinforced their struggle: The New Zealand government wanted to prevent, at any cost, the publication of expert opinions on Iraq. And still despite widespread criminality and human rights abuse in the ranks of your own police, you keep talking condescendingly about other Pacific nations, as if you enjoyed some sort of pre-eminent democratic credibility in the region! Your own violations of international agreements – including the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment to which you are a signatory – means you cannot speak with authority on these matters before you have implemented extensive systemic reform in your own government that will likely take decades to complete.

Kapiti police officers seen here as they return from the final send-off when they encircled my bus in a remote rural area as I departed from Raumati South.

Goodbye, general auditor. I had planned to come by and say hello, since you have a special responsibility for super-monitoring the police after the flaws of the independent police commission (IPCA) was publicly acknowledged in a rare admission of your government’s own dysfunction. I never got that far, but let me write a few lines at least. When I first visited IPCA in August 2012 to make a complaint, I realised something was wrong.

Shortly after I had arrived in the waiting room to complete my complaints form, what appeared to be one of the chief investigators of the authority came in, accompanied by a senior police officer who gave me the usual stare associated with conspicuous surveillance. They then found out the officer needed to be taken for a guided tour of the independent commission premises! “Here is the nerve centre”, yelled the IPCA investigator as the police officer was taken inside the precincts of the investigative body to great hilarity, all in a shameless display of the level of complete collusion. Little wonder my subsequent two complaints never got further than to Kathy Irvine, the gatekeeper who stops most applications before they even reach the investigation stage – and whose qualifications for her job according to herself consists of having been in the same position for 12 years.

Also, since you are the general auditor, beyond IPCA, I encourage you to look carefully at the use of police manpower in this operation. In particular, check out the nightshifts done

by Kapiti police and the organised crime agency OFCANZ in the period from November 2012 to March 2013. Can you explain why, in a democracy, it is legitimate to keep police officers salaried in the middle of the night for the single purpose of waking people up with

force? Again, the local population of Raumati South may not realise the full grotesqueness of the electro-magnetic methods used, but they can confirm the presence of noisy unmarked police cars every day in The Esplanade between midnight and dawn for most of the last four months, and in Wellington before that. And that was not only one car per day. Let’s put a conservative estimate of 3 police officers working night and day for the altogether 8 months I stayed in New Zealand. What is the bill for that? And, even more importantly, what are the results? Despite having criminalised large parts of the adult population of Raumati and East Clive who violated both the anti-harassment act and the anti-torture act (and led them to criminalise their own children), you did not manage to stop my Iraq writings or my criticism of the Norwegian and Dutch police forces. After having violated the act of torture crimes systematically for more than 250 days, the only result was that I moved between three places in a limited region around Wellington, and finally left after the electromagnetic torture had reached a level where it was so intense that it was threatening my general health in a very obvious way.

A special good bye to the white lower middle class semi-rural population of New Zealand that is sometimes referred to contemptuously as “bogans”. I got to see many of you during my month-long stay in East Clive, Hastings in December 2012 and January 2013. In some ways I find you more honest than the rest of New Zealanders. You hate sexual otherness from the bottom of your heart, and you are not shy about it. I am still disappointed though.

At a certain point at school, you should have learnt that extra-judicial persecution is something the government does in North Korea, and not in democracies. Even if you didn’t remember that, have you not read about the massive impact bullying can have, and how easily it can lead to suicide? Then remember that police stalking is teenage bullying on speed. I don’t understand how you can cry about the horrible problems of bullying in one second and then go on to participate with eagerness in bullying of complete strangers in a format that is a thousand times worse. Let me add the fact that what you did was just for show, perhaps 2% of the full stalking operation: Public elements of police stalking typically focus on hilarity-evoking street theatre, all seemingly very distant from the raw torture dynamic that lies at the heart of these operations. But try to be mathematical about the noise harassment you and your neighbours engaged in during a typical stalker patrol.

Multiply that activity with the typical duration of a stalking operation (in my case two and a half years). Then add the fact that every night, the police wakes up the stalking victim on average 5 times. In my case, that latter aspect alone amounts to more than 1,200 nightly interruptions over an 8-month period in New Zealand. That is 1,200 counts of transgressions of the anti-torture act.

Kapiti types But again, my beef is not mainly with you. Yours is a perfectly honest redneckism whish speaks its name with complete clarity. I am far more eager to say goodbye at some length to the so-called intellectuals of New Zealand, who are supposed to exist in large numbers in places like Raumati and in Wellington suburbs like Kelburn. Congratulations to you, because you have just empowered the people whose vision of society is as antithetical to yours as you can possibly imagine. Unlike the bogans who at least stay truthful to their own shallow ideals, you are the alchemists of your own revolutions. You claim to be Buddhists, environmentalists or leftists. And at the same time you behave like fascists. To a greater degree than your compatriots, then, you are a complete and utter joke. With your plethora of fancy flags of convenience, you are in fact far more dangerous to New Zealand democracy than your political opponents, who at least dare speak their true name. You, by way of contrast, run their police-state errands while pretending to be truthful to your own lofty principles. Oh yes, you can make politically correct sounds every now and then. But take hard core human rights issues like the presumption of innocence and the right of the accused to be heard, and it emerges that it is the essential similarity between oh-so-artsy Raumati and the uneducated illiterate bogans of East Clive, Hastings that is the defining characteristic of early 21st-century New Zealand society. In mattes of human rights, you, too, are illiterate. Do you really not understand that if you systematically undermine the presumption of innocence for other people, your victims will be tempted to respond in kind? Until now, I have been careful with suppressing the identity of my stalkers when documenting their activities, but after all I have been through, I may not be so diligent about that in the future after all.

Goodbye feminists of Wellington – or I should say, those of you who call yourself by that term. I realise you may have been attracted to the police’s discourse of extra-judicially punishing someone who engaged in street photography of women. Maybe you saw my efforts as anti-feminist. But please think a little longer. The police has no right to interfere with photography unless it is done in an illegal way (mine wasn’t). If you are unhappy with the law, the democratic way is to engage in parliamentary processes or start grassroots actions, and not to engage in state-sponsored vigilantism of the most medieval kind imaginable. The police has no right to concoct the law. And the police has absolutely no right to punish anyone – that is the sacred principle that supposedly constitutes the chasm between ourselves and North Korea. Despite this, in this process you took the police’s incoherent narrative at face value and began participating in the harassment operation without even hearing my side of the story and my academic explanation of my photography, relating to the powerful role of women in shaping street fashion, often by trumping designers and big commerce. Through your actions you have instead empowered Norwegian men who spend most of their time persecuting your sisters – sex workers who work legally under the “Swedish model” in the streets of Oslo, but who get systematically and illegally harassed by the police. Because they are your sisters, aren’t they? Those are the same Oslo police that cannot investigate rape even when there are signs of internal injuries, because they don’t have enough evidence! But they were very happy to come to New Zealand to carry out extra-judicial punishment in fancy hotels on your territory. And you have empowered their local New Zealand colleagues and buddies too, men who primarily express their opinion through the vroom of the car and the honk of the horn. Don’t you realise what a fantastic triumph it is for them when they were able to make you, the highbrow intelligentsia, behave like Nazi pigs too? Do you not realise that the police is inherently a patriarchal institution that will only serve to reproduce patterns of gender inequality?

Goodbye, Amnesty International. I have a special section for you after my experience with harassment at one of your events in Wellington in October. Yes, members of Amnesty participating in police-led harassment in their home country (conspicuous photography) while at the same time fighting hard for the rule of law at distant shores! With your energetic eye-rolling at developments in exotic countries and your firm closure of those same eyes before human rights crimes by your own police, you do take the concept of contradictions to a whole new level, even for New Zealand intellectuals. Not to speak of your special campaigns involving crocodile tears for people who get punished purely for their sexual orientation. Yeah right. I am sure you will be thrilled to learn that among the other partners enlisted by New Zealand police to take part just like you did were staff at the Chinese embassy in Wellington. That’s right New Zealand and China working side by side to destroy one of the world’s leading Iraq academics, who has perhaps done more than anyone else in the West terms of getting focus on rule of law problems in post-2003 Iraq.

When you are an Amnesty member and at the same time participate in police stalking you

have pretty much reached the outer boundaries for what sort of hypocrisy is humanly possible.

Goodbye Maoris of New Zealand. You were disproportionally recruited to harass me; you will be disproportionally targeted by the police when I am gone. Some things never change.

I have to say, though, I came to your islands with a political scientist’s vague idea about a well-functioning democracy – a beacon in a region where Australian politics is a shouting match about deporting foreigners, and where other countries still carry deep scars of colonialism. I depart with a sense of a nation building process that is only superficial.

Once you scratch below the surface – for example by reading a couple of newspapers around your national holiday on Waitangi Day – you realise the extent to which wounds have been stitched up without healing and thereby continue to fester. First there was a dramatic story about Maoris fighting among themselves about who should accompany the PM for the festivities. The PM himself made it perfectly clear that he could not care less.

One day later, a jubilant report on the proceedings in the Dominion Post concluded that everything had passed off without major incident! Not since I spent weeks perusing the Basra Times from the 1920s during my doctoral thesis have I come across a similar sense of condescension and that same familiar master narrative: Primitive natives will forever remain forever locked in their own paltry bickering unless the civilising power of White Man is interposed.

Goodbye, all honest citizens of New Zealand, whatever background you may have. I know you exist in large numbers even though none of you came forward to help me during my stay. You are fighting a valiant fight on issues like the environment, nuclear and foreign policy. But you should know that the real chancre through which many of the impositions from abroad pollute your country is something called OFCANZ, the organised and financial crime fighting agency. That agency is guided not by what the law says, but what is best practice in the FBI. It is particularly important to stress that what I have been exposed to in terms of sleep deprivation is not the result of an isolated renegade unit. The manpower hours speak for themselves: Someone high up must have known the purpose of all those nightshifts. There is not much legitimate police work to do in The Esplanade, Raumati South at 4 in the morning. What the top brass knew of the exact operational detail can perhaps be disputed, but they knew those people were there, paid by the government of New Zealand, for the single purpose of committing crimes of torture. These OFCANZ teams seem as institutionally criminalised as their counterparts in Norway and the Netherlands: They are so accustomed to breaking the law that without doing it, they might have trouble finding ways of doing what they believe is their job.

Perhaps they are best described as fake police. I should stress that this is not something I

am the first to say; it is something that emerges from the proceedings of your own courts, which recently threw out a case where the police had forged documents. When called out, the police publicly expressed dismay they were not allowed to carry on with their forged prosecution! Of course warnings of this kind are probably not enough to address the patterns of institutionalised criminality that exist in institutions that are devoted to perverting the cause of justice. Even purges of these institutions may be a too soft approach. Only long prison sentences in accordance with the crimes of tortures act as well as the complete disbandment of OFCANZ is likely to restore a modicum of legality in the New Zealand judicial system. Again, I am not saying anything terribly new here. The Dotcom case has long ago demonstrated OFCANZ’s complete subservience to foreign governments; the mental shift you need to make is to stop considering the mistreatment of Dotcom as an exception to the rule and rather see it as the tip of an iceberg.

On the whole, I would rate you as third worst country that I have been to in terms of police criminality, after Norway and Netherlands who initiated and escalated the crime against me. I was certainly treated more humanely in the United States than in New Zealand.

Perhaps what is most striking with you is your own seemingly unshakeable sense of democratic superiority, coupled with the horrific realities of rampant and institutionalised police criminality. That makes you into a particularly hypocritical nation even though similar forms of transgressions can be found in other places as well. Do you understand that you have done things that would be unacceptable for a democracy even if I were Jack the Ripper, Herman Goring and Usama bin Ladin all in one and the same person?

Goodbye, “anonymous government source”, who hinted at the truth in a commentary on the Dotcom case in the Dominion Post last August: “It doesn’t work that way. If it did, then we are a central African republic”. But it does work that way, and “central African” is indeed perhaps the most fitting description that can be given for you. Except that unlike most African republics, you are sailing under a false flag of democratic righteousness.

Whereas I have now departed, your immense problems in terms of nation-building and a broken judicial system remain.

April 2, 2013

Dear Switzerland. This is to inform you that I will shortly arrive in one of your cities. I would like to encourage you to kindly refrain from harassing or torturing me or

discriminating against me on the basis of my sexual orientation.

I realise this is an unusual and possibly superfluous request. After all, the UN human rights charter and the European human rights convention provide guarantees against extrajudicial punishment. The Convention against Torture specifically bans degrading and other unusual forms of punishment. And your own constitution of course guarantees against discrimination on the basis of way of life.

Nonetheless, since a large number of democratic states have indeed violated international charters and their own constitutions in my case, I wanted to add some further information about it. But since you are who you are and have one of the best human rights records in the world, I need not lecture you on how an operation of this kind is a flagrant violation of international treaties and conventions. In fact, in entering your country, I am simply following the advice of one your diplomatic corps members, with whom I discussed my case and who suggested this kind of approach as a possible option. Let me instead try to be the devil’s advocate and focus on how the operation is a failure even from the most cynical police perspective one can imagine.

Firstly, despite the fact that this operation involves enormous outlay of expenses and countless transgressions of international conventions and national legislation for a period of more than two years, it is very hard to see what results are achieved. Normally, when disruption methods are used by police as an alternative to prosecution, the idea is to find a practical solution to a perceived problem for which no legal approach is within reach. This typically involves forcing someone to change their behaviour or leave a particular geographical area or a whole national jurisdiction. But in my case, for two years after I stopped my controversial photography, left Norway and withdrew entirely from public spaces where my presence supposedly constituted a problem, the police forces in foreign countries keep punishing me even in in my private residence when I am working on academic studies related to Iraq! The result is that the original logic of disruption as a policing method is reversed and we are back to square one: Because of the intensification of the police harassment in my private home including intensive use of non-conventional, Mengele-inspired directed energy weapons, I am forced back on the streets, where I supposedly constitute a greater threat to the public safety because of my erstwhile controversial photography. In other words, the police is exacerbating the problem rather than eliminating it! Not only that, when I am forced to move around a lot in the public sphere, inevitably a greater amount of police resources are needed to keep track of me. In other words, I am more in the public sphere where I am supposedly a problem, at a greater cost for the police. Inevitably, the quality of real policing will be affected when resources and the attentiveness of the police get diverted to harassing me instead. Some of the resources that get tied up in this way are also probably of a quite advanced and valuable

nature, since the mainstay of police stalking is extreme intrusion – in my case requiring surveillance and foreign linguistic capabilities that would likely be assigned to anti-terror operations under normal circumstances. My specific case also presents a tragic but very thought-provoking juxtaposition of real policing and absurd police-stalking digressions: When the Oslo police should have monitored the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik in spring 2011, they were busy extra-judicially punishing me for my legal photography Seattle, thousands of miles away from Norway.

This of course proves what I have always said, that the police operation targeting me is nothing but an extra-judicial punishment operation with zero law enforcement content.

What is enforced are the fantasies and bigotry of a renegade unit within the Oslo police, and what is broken is not only national law but international conventions on torture and other forms of inhuman and unusual punishment. This case could have been solved many years ago if the Oslo police had spent exactly 50 cents to take 5 minutes to tell me that they were concerned about my photography – in which case I would have promptly discontinued it without engaging in any sort of legal bickering. But the police weren’t interested in that kind of dialogue scenario. Instead they wanted to travel to exotic destinations and do extra-judicial punishment through “international police cooperation” at the taxpayer’s expense.

What this operation shows is that disruption doesn’t work when there is no plausible end game and when the target is convinced of his or her own innocence and hence unafraid to speak to the general public. Apart from the air miles accrued by the officers involved, there is no apparent purpose in this operation. That is, of course, unless the goal is to project the image of a police capable of enforcing arbitrariness in an unlimited way, going after its enemies even beyond national borders. If that is the case, however, there is no longer any difference between us and North Korea.

Now, I am sure you are wondering how a travesty like this could originate in Norway, which has a very reasonable human rights reputation. I myself was shocked at first. But after having three times unsuccessfully encouraged PM Stoltenberg to intervene, I have no other option than to situate my case within some broader and disturbing trends in Norwegian politics and society , and to try to describe those tendencies as best as I can as an historian.

The problem with many of the indexes that give Norway good human rights scores is that many of them rely upon lazy and unempirical reiterations of descriptions that may have been valid in the first part of the twentieth century, but are no longer adequate to describe the realities of Norwegian democracy. Always remember that many of these league tables, such as that of the World Justice Project, are mere perception indexes!

Historically, it makes sense to identify at least three trends in Norwegian law enforcement and politics that enable the paradox whereby a state with a liberal reputation is home to some of the most heavy-handed policing in the Western world.

The first is the Rinnan trend, going back to the Second World War, when the leaders of the pro-Nazi Rinnan gang impressed even Gestapo for their incredible brutality in torturing members of the Norwegian resistance. This kind of police brutality has reappeared with such regularity in Norwegian history that it makes sense to study it as a broader cultural problem. In the 1970s and the 1980s there was a high number of shocking police brutality cases in Bergen. More recently, the organised crime unit of the Oslo police has become something of a national centre of competence in illegal methods. In my own case, I experienced something of a Rinnan/Gestapo contrast when I left Norway following a month of heavy mistreatment by the Oslo police in March 2011 and found the FBI-led harassment in the USA to be a comparatively humane experience. But this tendency is not limited to specialised harassment units. Abuse of power is so rampant in Norwegian police that it can even be glanced from such open sources as the Twitter feed of the Oslo police, which in one case poked fun of Muslims for praying after a car breakdown and in the next expressed gleeful satisfaction that someone who had urinated publicly was made to dry up his urine using his jacket on an icy cold winter night.

The second important trend can be called the Dorenfeldt trend after the Norwegian chief prosecutor in the 1960s and 1970s, Lauritz Dorenfeldt. It is characterised by judicially weak and often hysterical prosecution attempts, frequently prompted by bigotry and anti-intellectualism as was seen in the cases against great Norwegian authors like Agnar Mykle and Jens Bjoerneboe. The trend was proven alive and well by a recent attempt to prosecute the anti-feminist Eivind Berge, though that case was promptly thrown out by the supreme court. The hysteria of individual cases like these in turn relates to a more systemic and institutionalised problem that makes Norway a little-noticed outlier in comparative Western justice: Its uniquely police-dominated prosecution service. Thanks to the heavy reliance on so-called police lawyers, prosecutions are often judicially inferior and subject to the whims of police officers to a greater extent than in any comparable Western judicial system. In my case this reached the point where police lawyers actually participated in the extra-judicial punishment and harassment orchestrated by the police – a mixing of roles from which even full-blooded totalitarian states tend to shy away.

Thirdly, there is a more general authoritarian tendency identified as the “Stalinist� trend by the celebrated Norwegian historian Jens Arup Seip already in the early 1960s. Seip specifically related it to the Norwegian Labour party and its heavy-handed ways of dealing with its enemies. Still today, it is often next to impossible to have a rational conversation with members of the Labour party regarding the historical legacy of the late Haakon Lie,

the Labour strongman of the second half of the twentieth century that prompted Seip to choose his radical nomenclature. More recently, the current Labour government has revived the authoritarian spirit of the past by introducing law proposals that verge on criminalising thought – as seen in legislative proposals regarding actions preparatory to a “potential terrorist act”, as well as a hate speech bill.

It is perhaps the fusion of these three trends that constitutes the most dangerous threat to the rule of law in Norway. It is that sort of fusion that enabled the economic crime agency Okokrim to push forward the police’s panopticon agenda, whereby among other things it has become impossible to procure a pay-as-you-go mobile in Norway without registering your full personal identity details. For its part, the Labour party became wedded to police criminality through two formative experiences over the last decade. First, there were the Aker Brygge murders in 2006, when the government responded by beefing up an organised crime fighting agency, giving it carte blanche prerogatives. Secondly, there was the passage of a law criminalizing buying (but not selling) sex in 2008. The law was as difficult to enforce as it sounds, but in order to make the statistics look good, the police have ended up harassing female sex workers (who were not supposed to be directly targeted by the bill). Both developments strengthened relations between the Labour party and the organised crime unit of the Oslo police to the point where the unit’s leaders publicly boasted of their liberty to limitlessly apply police methods that directly violate article 117a of the Norwegian penal code. As a result, Norway is now in situation shockingly similar to China, where the BBC recently revealed how a mere order from a police officer can confine an individual to forced labour. The only difference in Norway is that if you get placed on the hit list of the organised crime unit in Oslo, the police will follow you across the globe instead of incarcerating you as per the Chinese approach. It is a more expensive solution, but the police get to travel a lot.

Does this sound somewhat weird and unbelievable? To understand it, you need to appreciate the extent to which Norway has become influenced by Gulf state tendencies in recent decades. Again, I am building this mainly on what others have written about our excessive oil wealth, including the writings of Simen Saetre. One particularly important factor is the decline in educational standards. This is seen above all in the sciences, where Norway for the past few decades has been fast diving in the league tables and now has positions far down the lists that are not commensurate with our high standards of living.

Or maybe that is the problem, leading to an atmosphere where incompetence can thrive in the public sphere and where silly projects can easily obtain funding. In my case, this tendency was epically highlighted when Norwegian police officers followed me to Qatar and had to teach the Qatari police – officials of a rentier economy par excellence – the latest tricks in illegal policing. The Norwegian quest to punish me for my sexual orientation apparently resonated with the Wahhabi Qataris, whose campaign against polytheism is highly comparable to the Oslo police’s crusades against sexual minorities

and academics.

One final broad and somewhat related tendency that is particularly worth highlighting in my case relates to Labour politicians’ apparent fear of advanced knowledge. This has been expressed in many different ways over the past decade, one of which being the “reform” of Norwegian higher education that was implemented by Trond Giske, a previous Labour minister of education. The net effect of the move has been to severely cut down the time postgraduates spend on doing real research, thereby ruining postgraduate study programmes that were previously quite close to a semi-doctorate in terms of the time spent on real research. I have personally seen how this cultivation of mediocrity plays out in the field of Middle East studies, where people who talk a lot on TV and have extremely limited empirical knowledge of the region (let alone Arabic or Persian language skills) easily get promoted to high positions in the office of the prime minister Jens Stoltenberg.

Three times I have asked Stoltenberg to intervene in my case to simply discontinue the illegalities so that I can focus on my Iraq research. Three times Stoltenberg has refused to do anything, effectively covering the asses of some of the worst torturers and human rights criminals in post-Communist Europe. It is a sad fact that today, in what amounts to a War on Knowledge, Labour ministers feel closer to the thugs and torturers than to advanced academics.

I should stress that none of these criticisms and remarks are due to any general anti police attitude on my part. I am no anarchist. Quite the contrary, my criticism flows from a sense of deep respect for honest policing, as well as admiration for the often underpaid and underappreciated work done by a majority of highly competent police officers in Norway and elsewhere. Through my work on Iraq, I have come to recognise the great sacrifice made by police officers there, often giving their life in the fight for a more democratic society.

Nor are my writings intended as a criticism of the fight against organised crime in principle. But it seems to me there is the same problem of sloppy targeting in the war against organised crime that I have previously criticised in the war on terror. I have spent many years trying to explain US authorities why it is wrong to universally conceptualise Iraq’s Sadrists as terrorists, and that labels like “Mahdists” are often used to stigmatise people that have done no other crime than having a different point of view. That is exactly the same kind of logic that led me to getting targeted by Norwegian police. It is a logic which can easily turn the fight against organised crime into a war on dissenters, artists and free thinkers. Exactly like in the battle against terrorists, it is important that the police rise above their enemies instead of degenerating to standards that are not compatible with rule of law ideals, even in challenging territory involving organised crime. The fight against organised crime must become smarter, and that involves taking a critical look at many

so-called disruption methods. In areas where there is no law, the police must accept the fact that it is a conversation partner like everyone else, and work through democratic channels if it wishes to change something rather than trying to engage in “idea enforcement” on the pattern of the Oslo police.

After 780 days of continuous mistreatment, I am tempted to use colourful language of the kind employed by Thorgeir Thorgeieson in his criticism of the Icelandic police. The European Court of Human Rights found that it was not unreasonable to do so, and that the Icelandic government’s attempt to gag him was a violation of the right to freedom to expression. Let me nonetheless try to put this as clinically as possible: The police officers attached to my operation are not professional police. They are on the job to break the law, not to enforce it. What they are enforcing are their own ideas and concoctions, with zero reference to the laws on the books. They have a track record of embroiling authorities in scandal because of their dubious and illegal methods. After some of them had been in Brazil and illegally shared information about Norwegian citizens, a member of the Norwegian parliament had to travel all the way to South America to try to clean up after them! Much of what they touch ends up as scandal, and the only thing these people “disrupt” is often the provision of honest police work of the protect-and-serve category.

Again, these are the people who prioritised harassing a photographer over monitoring a mass murderer and terrorist.

Clearly, through association with these people, you run the risk of soiling your pristine reputation. They will try to subvert your laws and constitution in the way they have already done in a dozen other countries, including implicating the Netherlands and New Zealand in crimes against humanity. I need not tell you that any involvement in this operation would be incompatible with your illustrious role as a host for such important human rights organisations as the UN committee against torture, which works specifically to eliminate the degrading and unusual punishment of the kind the Norwegian police have embarked upon. And again, by colluding with them you run the risk of being affected by their contagious inability to get priorities right and differentiate between real crimes and things they just dislike.

I come to Switzerland with the singular ambition of working quietly on Iraq analyses, like the ones I have prepared for the 20 April local elections. Few other Western analysts provide commentary of this kind in a timely way, and it is unnecessary to point out the immense significance of Iraq to major drivers in international politics, ranging from the oil price to the challenge of radical Islamism and sectarian struggles in the wider Middle Eastern region. Since I was never given the right to explain myself to the Norwegian police, I have created my own quasi-legal process on my blog where I address every aspect of my case. I am happy to be subjected to any kind of electronic tagging or monitoring,

including inside my private dwellings (as of today, this monitoring is done illegally). I would abide by a restriction order to not carry any photographic devices, if that is the main worry related to me. I would provide advance notice of my movements to make it easier to monitor my every move: Lots of money could have been saved in that way and I don’t care much about my privacy since it has irrevocably been taken away from me by Norwegian police long time ago anyway. You can monitor as much as you want or ask me any question. But you cannot torture me.

I have shown that there is no criminal act involved in my photography (something even the Norwegian police officially admits). I have also shown that the slander story the police use to generate a pogrom based on my sexual orientation is also completely contradictive and lacking in basic logic. So what is left of the case against me? I have made it perfectly clear that I will never return to Norway unless those responsible are held accountable, so there is no point in trying to force me back. And so, even if the Norwegian government insists on its fanatic persecution, there is no rational reason other governments should follow its primitive example and carry on with an operation that is so flawed and embarrassing to the police that it cannot be formally recognised. Indeed, in line with the relevant international conventions, other governments have a duty to refuse cooperation with such an operation involving degrading and unusual punishment.

I rest my case.

April 18, 2013

“To us, freedom means everything, and without it life has no meaning.”

Those words were uttered by an historical figure vastly more important than me – King Haakon VII of Norway who made this point during a speech to Norwegian troops after his arrival in London in 1940 after having fled the Nazi occupation of Norway. But they apply with equal force to my situation and my reasons for coming to your shores today.

My country is once more under occupation by people with totalitarian political inclinations. They are officers in the organised crime unit of the Oslo police who have managed to instil servility in the Labour-led government, giving them unlimited powers to pursue extra-judicially any person they elect to put on their hit lists of disliked persons,

entirely without reference to any judicial process. They have lately been wreaking havoc in a number of Western countries as part of their more than two years long illegal, medievalinspired witch hunt of me for my perfectly legal photography. During the past year, the operation has also involved Mengele style torture techniques; lately the effect of this treatment has been such that I fear my general health is coming under serious threat.

I have in previous appeals tried to underline the structural reasons whereby a seemingly well-functioning democracy like Norway can submit to horrible police-state tendencies of this kind. They include the exceptional unprofessionalism of the Norwegian prosecution service, the absence of legal protection for sexual minorities that are not defined in gender terms, as well as the close ties between high officials in the Labour party and leading officers in the Oslo police. A deeper structural cause relates to the transformation of Norway to a state with certain rentenist characters, making it similar to states like Qatar in terms of the potential for extreme and irresponsible spending by incompetent elements of the state bureaucracy, who often get free hands to pursue their own private fanaticisms and personal vendettas.

It is my fear that Norwegian police will try to replicate this operation in the UK and I would like to encourage you to refrain from approving the barbaric methods they propose to use.

Beyond the obvious human rights argument against this kind of operation, I have also described how the police’s actions would appear irrational even from a more narrow and cynical police perspective. Whereas expulsion from an area or a country is a recognised aim of disruption as a police method, a global persecution without any clear aim that goes on for more than two years means wasting both resources and the reputation of the police as time passes by without any convincing results. The catastrophic consequences of failed priorities like these became painfully obvious in Norway during 2011, when it emerged that the police officers who had spent time harassing me extra-judicially in exotic locations overseas had failed to pay attention to Anders Behring Breivik, the terrorist who killed almost 100 people in an attack on 22 July 2011.

It goes without saying that antics like these are entirely unsuitable to a complex and sophisticated society like yours. There are also additional reasons that make me think your government will have special reasons to reject this kind of operation. The UK is the historical home of transparent policing and the great innovation of badged officers. I give you credit for the fact that even today, in the complicated area of the fight against organised crime, you continue to use uniformed police to a greater extent than many other nations, thus addressing the acute need for greater accountability in this area of policing.

Also, you have at your disposal a tool which is designed to create the layer of public vigilantism that police elsewhere have tried to recreate through more totalitarian means: The sex offender register. If you are worried about me, please feel free to inscribe me in your rolls based on the remarkable accusations put forward by Norwegian authorities: “This man is suspected of having engaged in (perfectly legal) photography in pursuit of his sadomasochist desires. Because he took a number of pictures of people wearing winter clothes such as fur hats and Sorel boots for an alleged project on fashion history, Norwegian police has theorized that he may have some kind of fetish related to Nike shoes. He has never photographed the same person on more than one occasion, let alone touched anyone against their will. But you never know with these types.”

This is neither eloquent nor impeccably logical, but it aptly summarises the Oslo police’s accusations and claims about me in a few sentences. I have moreover suggested a series of other voluntary restrictions on my movements to help alleviate any fear that I might reengage in controversial photography; this offer still stands. But in a rule of law society, you cannot treat a controversial photographer worse than people that have raped and murdered.

Here are some more ideas to discourage you from taking part in this operation. The challenges your police is facing are in many ways more complex than other European nations. You have in your population serious challenges relating to political extremism, whether left or right, Christian or Islamic. And yet at the same time you have perhaps the greatest concentration on the planet of brilliant thinkers with minority backgrounds, ranging from Muslims to members of the kink community. You cannot afford to get in conflict with these whole communities by pursuing the primitive thought police methods of the Norwegian authorities, which in my case means persecuting someone for their sexual orientation in the absence of any criminal act.

Finally you have in your country a more lively debate about the police and police monitoring mechanisms than elsewhere. I come to that debate with a perfectly open mind.

By simply refraining from harassing me extra-judicially, you can count on me as someone who will give credit where it is due and uphold the presumption of innocence for the police in the same way that I expect the police to uphold that principle with regard to myself.

Are really your relations with Norway sufficiently important to get your government implicated in a crime against humanity? Is it worth putting your reputation on the line just for the sake of satisfying the Norwegian Labour-government’s narrow-minded quest to destroy extra-judicially one of the world’s most prominent Iraq academics? With the

robustness of your press and its well-known thirst for scandal, it would be only a matter of time before this case reached the point where the full truth came out.

I come to your country, the historical bastion of European freedom, with the sole aim of writing academically on the results of the Iraqi local elections on 20 April. I have already been fighting this police operation on the beaches and in the air, and will continue to do so wherever the struggle takes me. I hope you, like the great Winston Churchill, will understand the serious nature of the challenge presented by fascism from other parts of Europe, and will take the necessary measures to once more shine as a beacon of liberty in our part of the world.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

April 21, 2014

I’m writing this because the mistreatment that I suffer at the hands of Norwegian police operating abroad has worsened significantly in recent weeks, to the point where I fear my health is at a breaking point. For more than a year now I have suffered in silence, concentrating on my own projects instead of complaining about the police’s mistreatment, but after the recent severe intensification of the mistreatment I have no other choice than to do this. I consider my life to be in immediate danger and I want there to be at least a record of what has happened.

As outlined previously, the operation against me consists of two very different elements.

Firstly, there is the public aspect, which consists of various forms of theatrical stalking in

public areas in which the general public is invited to take part. This is just a gimmick that has no real impact on my situation anymore and that probably accounts for less than 1 per cent of the total activities of the operation, but it is probably useful for the police in order to give them a cover-up for the more sinister activities that form the second and most important aspect of the operation: Systematic sleep deprivation and torture with the use of electromagnetic devices.

Whereas I have previously focused on describing element number one simply because it is the one that is best known by a large number of potential witnesses, it is this second and secret dimension that has changed radically over recent weeks. The use of electromagnetic devices was started in the Netherlands on a daily basis in late June 2012. When I was in New Zealand from July 2012 to March 2013, I was mostly allowed reasonable amounts of sleep and the use of the device was of limited extent and intensity. After I came to the UK in April 2013, a pattern whereby I was completely sleep deprived every other night was in force for long periods, and continued when I travelled to the Republic of Ireland in December 2013. Since February this year, about the time I began writing more about Iraq again because of the elections, the main problem has been the extreme force and brutality with which the device is used, making it likely that severe physical injury is likely to ensue soon (I’m already experiencing deteriorating vision). We have lately reached the point where the operation has the character of attempted murder rather than simple persecution and torture. As the cumulative effect of the constant sleep deprivation over a period of more than 3 years kicks in, I have less and less physical energy to move away when the attacks commence. Remember that since February 2013 alone I have been deprived of an average of 4 hours a sleep every day for more than 400 nights, equalling 1,600 hours or 66 days (more than 2 months) of consecutive sleep.

I am aware that, to the uninitiated, what I describe may sound like an obvious psychological disorder, but there are some very clear logical inconsistencies in the semi-official narrative of the police operation that should raise eyebrows at least among those who live in the affected areas and know about the more theatrical stalking activities.

Above all this relates to nightly activities and my choice of places to stay. If the operation was mainly about social stalking, why wouldn’t I simply move to a peaceful remote place and live quietly there? (I have tried that, in New Zealand.) Also, why am I not complaining primarily about social harassment but about nightly disturbances, at times of the day when few members of the public are even awake? Taxi drivers and hotel staff in places like Richmond (London, UK) and Portmarnock (County Fingal, Republic of Ireland) can testify to the fact that for the past year I have in long periods been sleep deprived systematically, often travelling to airports during the night to get away from electromagnetic harassment at the hotels. Why would I seek nightly access to such busy social spaces if the stalking was the main problem? Why was it that later on, in early March this year, I slept better during a short visit to war-torn Baghdad than in the most

peaceful locations in Ireland? The answer is of course that in Baghdad my persecutors were themselves a little stretched thin, probably not revealing to their Iraqi counterparts the full details of the electromagnetic torture and therefore unable to do the nightshifts they had done in Europe. However, the fact that they were able to operate at all meant that the sum of other problems with respect to living in Iraq made it impossible for me to try that for a longer period.

I can only speculate about the reason for the recent extreme escalation, which comes without any change on part of my behaviour or any public criticism of the operation.

However, it is increasingly clear to me that in pursuing me internationally for more than 3 years, the goal of the Norwegian police has been not only to expel me from my home country or the entire EU, but quite possibly to execute me extra-judicially or try to force me to commit suicide (something I will never do). The best proof of this is that they decided to follow me to Iraq. If they decide to follow me to Iraq, one of the world’s most dangerous places, it me, it means they will go everywhere on the planet, and that – apart from the operation’s own self-perpetuation – its only remaining possible goal is to eliminate me.

In light of this and with dramatic intensification of mistreatment over recent work no other choice but to put on the record medical information relevant to my case. It should be stressed that Norwegian police probably went in and out as they pleased in my apartment in Oslo before February 2011, and that they were given access to my flat in the Netherlands from January to July 2012, providing them with a theoretical possibility to poison me via foodstuffs at any time. However, given the nature of my symptoms, it seems reasonable to focus on injections and dental work in the period preceding the problems. I have described the procedures I consider potentially relevant below. Of course, nothing in this should be construed in any shape or form as an accusation against the health personnel involved.

Rather, these are clues that may be used to guide an independent investigation if something serious should happen to my health in order that every possible lead gets exhausted.

-Annual flu vaccinations, mostly done at private hospitals in Oslo (Fredrik Stang and Volvat).

-Temporary root canal completed in June 2009 at a private dentist in Oslo, Hilde Loevlie Abry. Usual local anaesthetics. Follow-up treatment delayed during the swine flu epidemic in autumn 2009.

-Permanent root canal completed in August 2010 at a private dentist in Oslo, Lars Doeving. Finalization of previous treatment. Recovery was unremarkable.

-Anal injection of Botox in March 2012 at a public hospital in Leiden, Netherlands (Diaconessen). Treatment for anal fissure following digestive problems when Norwegian police began sleep-depriving me in February 2011. On arrival to doctor’s office where the doctor (Tjon Lim Sang) and the nurse (A van der Willigen) were present, the injection substance was already loaded into a syringe, with no opportunity for me to verify its content. The doctor explained this with reference to austerity measures at the hospital whereby Botox injections were administered in batches to several patients who all received injections from a larger and hence cheaper container. When I turned off my mobile to avoid disturbances during the procedure , the doctor chuckled and asked whether I was going to take any pictures. After the injection there was no immediate improvement with respect to the fissure and severe anal bleeding ensued a couple of days later. It should be mentioned also that, generally speaking, a high number of the staff at the hospital cooperated enthusiastically with the softer aspects of the police operation, yelling “have a nice day” (the signature greeting of the police) to each other at all times. I eavesdropped on the conversation two of them had in Dutch after they had engaged in some intense “ have a nice day” exchanges and heard one of them say, “ you know, we’ve got to help the police”.

-Second anal injection of Botox at same hospital in July 2012. Subsequent to this injection, the fissure improved significantly.

Again, nothing in this is intended as an accusation of criminality on anyone. If nothing happens to me, this note is of no relevance. However, my point in doing this is that if something should happen to me, this information should be considered, of course without prejudice in any shape or form or without usurping the presumption of innocense for anyone. I have no known diseases that would be likely to bring about a sudden deterioration of my health and because of two chronic but mild diseases (asthma and ulcerative proctitis) I have been subjected to a good deal of medical testing previously. I will do my best to continue to cover the Iraq elections, but I’m not optimistic about my health prognosis.

HOME

ABOUT

ARCHIVES LEGAL CASE SUMMARY

MY JOURNEY

How new policing methods can undermine the rule of law and modern liberal judicial philosophy

May 17, 2015

Originally posted on Iraq and Gulf Analysis:

After having suffered in silence for many years now, I wanted to write up some general and academic thoughts on the extrajudicial punishment operation that I have been exposed to since 2011.

In the most general terms possible, my diagnosis of so-called modern Western civilisation following years of harassment is that we do not have a “rule of law society�. By this I mean two things. One, the rule of law is not guaranteed institutionally. Second, the rule of

law is not enshrined in culture, to the point where culture could act as a counterforce in the event that institutions should fail. With these two combined shortcomings, Western � democratic� credentials aside, there is very little in the way of checks and balances in place if and when a government elects to trespass on the fundamental principles of habeas corpus, equality before the law and the presumption of innocense.

Let‌ View original 2,132 more words