Mailgate

A very dirty story is rolling up in Sweden at the moment. Sweden is going to the polls this year and the ruling socialist party has been trailing in the polls for a year mainly because of all the scandals that have plagued them, starting with the tsunami and the foreign ministers decision to go to the theatre rather than finding out about a disaster where she knew Swedes had died.

Anyway, back to the current scandal, mails had been circulating around in political journalists inboxes and also to some politicians claiming that the leader of the Conservative party Fredrik Reinfeldt was involved in dubious affairs, for one having an au pair from the Baltics, perish the thought. There were other claims as well one pertaining to his father and alleged actions. I guess that the sins of the father is a valid argument for socialists, I'll remember that further on.

In the end the Conservative party decided to follow up on this smearcampaign, they asked the parliaments security department to find out what they could about these emails since they do constitute a crime. The report came back showing to no big surprise that whoever sent the emails had sent them from a computer at Sveavägen 68, an address in central Stockholm. The real fun part in this is that the address is the Socialist party headquarter...

Of course this now gets public, the Conservative party leader files charges with the police and the official socialist machinery starts churning. First reaction from the socialist party is that someone has hacked the computers, they are of course innocent, it could have been a disgruntled employee (cleaner or janitor was implied), funnily enough the very groups the socialists claim to represent. The theories become even more ludicrous when rumours surface thath the whole thing is a carefully orchestrated maskirovka by the Conservative party. When the evidence became more apparent that this could not be the case since emails were sent during regular working hours and no logs of breach could be found the socialist party claimed that it was all an "internal issue" and they would look in to it. At the same time the Police mysteriously "loses" the filed complaint, the reason is computer failure. This all sounds like something out North Korea.

Finally the Socialists release a statement shortly saying that their investigation has shown that this was a one man job without sanctions from higher up and that the person had been "let go", however people wanted to know who he was, at first the Socialists refused to part with this information but in light of public pressure they finally released his name. Mats Lindgren has turned out to be more than just the regular employee at the party headquarter, he was recruited straight into the headquarter six years ago and his job function was to do very high profile and secret surveys detailing what arguments would work in an election race, these findings were presented to the partys executive committe on which the leader of the socialist party was, the current prime minister.

So now we can summarise what the socialists claim
1. The author of the smear campaign acted alone.
2. The executive committee is extremely sorry
3. They have also been victims of smear campaigns.

The leaders of the socialists very quickly apologized for the occurred campaing but they all added in the end that they also had been victims of the same type campaings but much worse in their case, very good, victimization to try and defuse.

The author of the campaing says that he acted alone without any sanction from the top and that he did it because he felt that the media so unfairly had reported on scandals in the socialist party, not really the medias fault that a party that has more or less become one with the state produces scandals, that is what happens when a party is so sure to be in power they blur the lines between the party and the state.

There are some remaining problems with this scandal.
1. The sacrificed pawn is a very high ranking member of the socialist partys election strategy team.
2. The sacrificed persons explicit job was to find out what arguments worked in order to launch such campaigns.
3. He personally knew the leader of the socialist party
4. An official partypaper being freely distributed in Stockholm contains the exact same allegations as the email, albeit worded differently
5. This is not the first time this has occurred with emails being traced back to the socialists headquarter

One has to ask wheter this person, Mats Lindgren, worked alone, I highly doubt that, this has all been sanctioned from higher up and voices are now also leaking out that there has been a group working on this email campaign, we can only wait and hope that we get all information and foremost I hope that the socialists lose power this September, they need to be away from power for at least a decade.

Sadly I miss English links for this.


Sincerely
Mr SIlence Dogood