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After Inner City Press Scoop On Guterres Cover Up and Swanson Audio Ben Out of UN Feb 6

By Matthew Russell Lee, Audio, Patreon

UN GATE, Jan 31 – Three weeks after Inner City Press published leaked audio of UN investigator Ben Swanson recounting being ordered by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres  NOT to investigate sexual harassment committed by a UN Assistant SG, now more Swanson audio has emerged (see here for description and below), and now put online by Inner City Press on SoundCloud, here, with related letter here.

Now on January 31, 2025 Inner City Press report that Swanson is out at the UN, as of February 6.

Swanson said:

"this whole thing of retaliation has got the potential to cause us massive, massive problems if we get it wrong.”  As he describes the system, he says the U.N. used to open an investigation in response to a complaint, “and it was taking a long time because some of them are horribly complicated and some of them are just so trivial that they’re just not worth investigating entirely.”  He says the office trialed a process of getting the complaint from the U.N. ethics office, at which point it would write to the person accused of retaliating against a whistleblower or someone who reported misconduct, and ask them to “tell us why you’re not guilty.”   ”We’d get the stuff … in from the ethics office, we then write to the subject and, I’m paraphrasing here, saying, ‘Look, the ethics office have said that prima facie that you have retaliated therefore you are guilty of retaliation against Staff Member A, here’s all the material, here’s the ST/AI, write back to us in 10 days and tell us why you haven’t … why you’re not guilty of retaliation,'” he says, to chuckles from others in attendance.  Continuing, he says: “We’ve managed to cut the time down from 247 days down to about 45 because they write back straight away and invariably it’s ‘I don’t know anything about a protected act and this is nonsense, all I did was send out an email telling people to behave themselves.'”  “Then we sort of make the judgment of whether, is it worth getting 64gb of emails to prove that they haven’t only sent the email out, or do we take their word, their sworn word, for it and then say ‘well, ethics office, there is never ever going to be any sanction imposed for this retaliatory act, or whatever it’s called, and we’re not going to do anything else’?”  He says they are effectively doing the ethics office's job and the office had “swallowed it up and accepted it. We’ve done two now, and I think we’ve got another two in the pipeline, and it’s working quite nicely, that brings the figures down [and] that gets the Americans off the U.N.’s back, [it] means they don’t reduce their contribution.”

   Inner City Press, which Guterres has banned from the UN as it asks about these and his abuses,  received from outraged UN whistleblowers video of sexual exploitation, they said, in a white UN-marked vehicle, here.  Now Instagram, Facebook.

  Inner City Press exclusively published audio of OIOS' Ben Swanson saying that one of Guterres' Assistant Secretaries General thrust his hand down the pants of a female staffer - and Guterres, "a politician," said to cover it up. Audio here, here on Patreon, transcribed here:

"I was summoned to a meeting in the SGS conference room in February (2018) where the SG, DSG, Legal Counsel and of all the special advisors and all that were there.  The SG is a politician and he wanted a sound byte result and the soundbite result was that paragraph which I showed you before.  I tried to make the point that there's three overlapping things with this, there's the culture, the investigations and there's the accountability piece.    Now, I was trying to tell him what actually apart from the numbers that's coming in, the investigations piece is already, we're OK because we know what we're doing and we're able to do the investigations. It's just with the increase in demand and I said the accountability is a problem because of whatever the tribunals are doing. And it's your culture's the problem.  I said I said I had a D1 female D1 in my office last week. She in tears telling me about how an ASG put his hand inside her trousers and when she tried to discuss how to complain about it, she was told it wouldn't do her any good and he was a favored son. And you're a woman.  So I tried to tell the story and I got (knock on table) I was cut there."

  On July 1 AFP reported of the UNTSO video that "It was originally published on June 23 on the Twitter account of Inner City Press, a blog in open conflict with the UN, which has been denied access "for 721 days" , said its author Matthew Lee.  The account claimed a few days later that this scene was filmed in Tel Aviv (Israel)." [Would they say that the Rappler is "in open conflict" with Duterte?]

 Inner City Press will continue to demand re-accreditation.

  On June 26, despite the story now being reported from Austria to Israel to Switzerland, those let in from Al Jazeera and other publications asked nothing. We'll have more on this. Watch this site.

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