A Muslim American seeking asylum in Sweden claimed Wednesday he was detained at the U.S. government's request while in the United Arab Emirates last summer, tortured in custody and interrogated about the activities of a Portland, Oregon, mosque.
Yonas Fikre told a news conference Wednesday that he was held for 106 days and was beaten, threatened with death and kept in solitary confinement in a frigid cell.
The 33-year-old, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Eritrea, says he had attended the same mosque in Portland as a man who has been charged in a plot to detonate a bomb in the northwestern U.S. city. He moved to Sudan in 2009 and later to the United Arab Emirates. He went to Sweden, where he has relatives, after being released from detention on Sept. 15.
Fikre, who converted to Islam in 2003, is the third Muslim man from Portland to publicly say he was detained while traveling abroad and questioned about Portland's Masjid-as-Sabr mosque. Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali American who is awaiting trial on a charge of plotting to set off a bomb in downtown Portland in November 2010, occasionally worshipped there.
Back when he was 19, the FBI helped him get the supplies he needed to make a bomb to blow up the Christmas tree lighting. They arrested him moments after his cell phone failed to set the thing off.
A decade ago, seven Muslims with ties to the mosque were arrested following a failed effort to enter Afghanistan and fight U.S. forces.
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#7
Hey, what's that Arabic word that means "lying like a rug whenever infidels are involved"?
See here. There's taqqiyah, which is saying that which is untrue, and kitman, which is lying by omitting the critical part of the truth. Does anyne remember the other kind of permitted lying? Something like tarawi or tawari...
#1
The shark or fish that took the bait under that float must be good sized, but it clearly is being pulled , not under power, and pulled with tension from below. Likely a fishing buoy or sport fishing device.
#3
following up on NMBS's comment. Here in Hawaii there is a well-known story about a whale who got tangled in a large bouy and towed the thing from Alaska to Mau'i. Could be.
Advice from a successful -- and tax-cutting -- finance minister
When Europe's finance ministers meet for a group photo, it's easy to spot the rebel -- Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden's finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His 'stimulus' was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy -- the so-called 'punk tax cutting' agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result.
Three years on, it's pretty clear who was right. 'Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus,' he says. 'Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt.' Tax-cutting Sweden, by contrast, had the fastest growth in Europe last year, when it also celebrated the abolition of its deficit. The recovery started just in time for the 2010 Swedish election, in which the Conservatives were re-elected for the first time in history.
All this has taken Borg from curiosity to celebrity. The Financial Times recently declared him the most effective finance minister in Europe. When we meet in his Stockholm office on a Friday afternoon (he and his aide seem to be the only two left in the building) he says he is just carrying on 20 years of reform. 'Sweden was a textbook case of European economic sclerosis. Very high taxes and huge regulatory burden.' An economic crisis in the early 1990s forced Sweden on the road to balanced budgets, and Borg was determined the 2007 crash would not stop him cutting the size of government.
'Everybody was told "stimulus, stimulus, stimulus",' he says -- referring to the EU, IMF and the alphabet soup of agencies urging a global, debt-fuelled spending splurge. Borg, an economist, couldn't work out how this would help. 'It was surprising that Europe, given what we experienced in the 1970s and 80s with structural unemployment, believed that short-term Keynesianism could solve the problem.' Non-economists, he says, 'might have a tendency to fall for those kinds of messages'.
Continued on Page 47
#1
Living in Estonia, I admire Sweden's history. But having traveled the area extensively, I would say that I'd rather have a Finn any day. I think it comes from the self-reliance they had to exhibit in the war against the Soviets.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
When Europe's finance ministers meet for a group photo, it's easy to spot the rebel -- Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden's finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His 'stimulus' was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy -- the so-called 'punk tax cutting' agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result.
All this has taken Borg from curiosity to celebrity. The Financial Times recently declared him the most effective finance minister in Europe. When we meet in his Stockholm office on a Friday afternoon (he and his aide seem to be the only two left in the building) he says he is just carrying on 20 years of reform. 'Sweden was a textbook case of European economic sclerosis. Very high taxes and huge regulatory burden.' An economic crisis in the early 1990s forced Sweden on the road to balanced budgets, and Borg was determined the 2007 crash would not stop him cutting the size of government.
